FICTION ADVOCATE’S BRIAN HURLEY recently reviewed “The Long Ships,” by Gunnar Bengtsson. Here are four of the many reasons he gives for reading it:

…this is definitely a story with a Hero…

…Although it’s chiefly an adventure tale, with enough bloody swords and casual rape to satisfy a lusty 12-year-old, The Long Ships draws on extensive historical research and a rich literary tradition. Bengtsson, who wrote a PhD on Geoffrey Chaucer, studied many of the same sources that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien…

…Violence comes quickly, but our view of a bustling, exotic world, stretching from Córdoba to Kiev, unfolds magisterially…

…It valorizes berserker rage, plunder, and wife-theft as honorable deeds undertaken for the good of family and kingdom…

Read all of the reasons in the Fiction Advocate review of “The Long Ships.”