Vinland's Iron Harvest
A Novel of the Norse Americas

About this book:

At the edge of the known world, the Norse settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows is dying. Ten winters have yielded nothing but rotting ships, dull axes, and a hunger for iron that the bogs alone might answer. Leif Eriksson has staked everything on a desperate gamble: to wrest steel from the swamp before the first snow traps them forever. But the bogs hold more than ore—they hold the preserved dead of a people who have watched from the tree line for centuries. When the diggers uncover a leathery corpse strangled by hemp rope, the fragile peace shatters. The Skrælings have come for their ancestor. They stay for the furnace.

*Vinland's Iron Harvest* is a visceral saga of survival where metallurgy is magic and every bloom of iron is bought in blood. Master smith Skofte battles wet clay, green wood, and his own failing hands to birth a furnace that can turn rust into steel. His apprentice Hallvard comes of age between hammer and spear. And Leif, the explorer who reached the horizon, must now defend a foothold that the land itself seems determined to swallow. Here, the clash of civilizations isn't measured in armies but in the temperature of a kiln, the temper of a blade, and the terrible calculus of what men will burn to keep the dark still.

From the award-winning author of *The Long Ships' Wake* comes a novel that smells of peat smoke and salt spray, where history turns on the pivot of a bellows. For readers who crave the grim authenticity of Bernard Cornwell, the environmental stakes of Jean Auel, and the sheer, shivering wonder of standing at the world's end—this is the forge where a new world was hammered into shape, one glowing bloom at a time.