The Paradise War (The Song of Albion Book 1)

Wolves in Oxford; extinct beasts in Scotland: the barriers between our world and the Celtic Otherworld are breaking down. Two men are drawn into Albion, and changed for ever. The aristocratic Simon Rawnson and his American friend, narrator Lewis Gillies, are postgraduate students at Oxford, free to go chasing impetuously off to the far north of Scotland in pursuit of an extinct beast supposedly sighted by a farmer. Simon clambers inside a cairn and vanishes. Helped by a Celtic expert, the mad professor Nettles, Lewis follows - and finds himself in Albion, a Celtic paradise (our world and Albion are apparently coming unravelled, however). In Albion, the two friends both become warriors, only to take opposing sides in a power struggle, with Lewis as warrior Llew siding with the good Phantarch, while Simon joins evil Nudd, King of the Underworld. Only by bringing Simon back to our world, Lewis reasons, can the evil be abated From the dreaming spires of Oxford, Lewis Gillies drives north to seek a mythical creature in a misty glen in Scotland. Expecting little more than a weekend diversion, Lewis finds himself in a mystical place where two worlds meet, in the time-between-times -- and in the heart of a battle between good and evil. The ancient Celts admitted no separation between this world and the Otherworld: the two were delicately interwoven, each dependent on the other. The Paradise War crosses the thin places between this world and that, as Lewis Gillies comes face-to-face with an ancient mystery -- and a cosmic catastrophe in the making. In this, the first book in Stephen Lawhead's Song of Albion trilogy, Lewis Gillies comes face to face with an ancient mystery ...