The Blue Glass of Chartres
A Novel of the Master Glazier

About this book:

In the soot-choked workshops of twelfth-century France, a single color holds the power to elevate a cathedral into heaven—or damn a master to obscurity. Thomas of Boulogne has spent his life coaxing light from sand and fire, but the blue that Abbot Suger demands for Saint-Denis refuses to exist in any furnace he commands. When a Venetian merchant slips through the rain with a pouch of impossibly pure pigment and a bishop's mandate summons him to Chartres under threat of ruin, Thomas is thrust into a race against winter, a ruthless rival guildmaster, and the unforgiving chemistry of his own craft.

With only four months to build a workshop, decode a foreign mineral, and raise three towering lancets plus a rose window that must blaze with the Virgin's own light, Thomas walks a knife's edge between alchemy and art. The secret blue—*zaffre*, smuggled from Persian mountains through Venetian galleys—promises salvation at a price that could bankrupt the chapter. But the merchant's contract hides clauses sharper than a grozing iron, and Master Fulk of Paris circles like a wolf, ready to fill Chartres with dull, profitable glass the moment Thomas falters.

*The Blue Glass of Chartres* is a luminous feat of historical fiction: a novel where theology burns in the kiln, trade routes carry more than pigment, and the quest for a single perfect hue becomes a battle for the soul of a cathedral. For readers who love the textured immersion of *The Pillars of the Earth* and the intellectual tension of *The Name of the Rose*, here is a masterpiece forged in fire—where every shard of colored glass is a prayer, and the light that passes through it changes everyone it touches.