How I came to read this book was a little strange. My mother recently turned 60, and I chose a card with a multimedia illustration of a hedgehog - gouache, ink, and what appears to be oil pastel. I recognised the style, and the back of the card told me the artist was Brian Wildsmith. Best known for his children's books, Wildsmith started his career illustrating other people's novels. One of these book wrapper illustrations was for a novel called The Queen's Brooch, and features a multicoloured Celtic warrior in the same detailed and distinctive gouache, ink, and pastel media as the hedgehog card. I've always enjoyed historical fiction - as you can tell from my Read list - and was curious enough to look it up. Anyway, as it transpires, The Queen's Brooch is a children's book. However, the author Henry Treece, wrote some historical novels for adults.

The Golden Strangers is an interesting book. I've not read many set in what I assume is the late Chalcolithic/early Bronze Age era, as it arrives in Britain with the copper 'sword[s] out of the sun' in the hands of Celtic invaders. I love archaeology, and am fortunate enough to live in a place littered with menhirs and quoits. Go out onto the moors and throw a stone, and you're bound to hit a megalith of some kind.

The book follows multiple characters. Garroch, the son of the Old Man of his people; Brach, his favourite daughter; Rua, an unfortunate woman of a nearby tribe of fisherfolk who kills her father to become Garroch's unwanted wife; Barduca, king of the invading Celts, and Isca, the Celtic princess. The differing points of view aren't limited to separate chapters, and often switch from paragraph to paragraph. This can be a little dizzying at times, and can unfortunately pull the reader away from the perspective of the character the chapter largely focuses upon. It can also lead to the prose telling us how a character is feeling and why. This can be a little distracting, but the general feel of the novel is one told in a smoky hut, around a fire in the depths of winter, and I can't say that it detracts from that particular ambience too much.

Brutality is commonplace within the novel. Characters are variously sacrificed, raped, tortured, smothered in corn dollies, mauled by wolves, humiliated, and are often terrified of the turning of the seasons, their gods, the titular Golden Strangers, and the land itself. There is cannibalism, incest, war, starvation, and slavery. The style of the prose leaves this brutality somewhat detached at times, even when fairly detailed in its description. Again, this fits the saga-like feel of the novel. However, I'd suggest to those interested in this book and concerned about triggering content that they may want to check out the warnings below before reading. I have a strong stomach and I'm not easily disturbed by brutality in fiction, but the unrelenting misery and bloodshed sometimes left me a little exhausted. The story often feels especially unkind towards women. The novel was written in the 1950s, and features the typical, patriarchal image of the past. We don't know how real women were treated in ancient Britain; the Golden Strangers doesn't attempt to do anything new or interesting with the place of women in Garroch's tribe, and quite often the female characters face their downfall through their love for the men around them, but I still found them interesting. I enjoyed vengeful Rua, and the fierce love Brach feels for her grandfather and father. I couldn't quite get a handle on Isca, however.

The prose is lyrical. I really enjoyed the writing itself, even when the dialogue could be clunky and declarative. I do understand the reasoning for this, though. It fits with the general epic style of the book, despite being stilted and a little painful to read at times. Here are some samples of the descriptive prose. I particularly like the first and last excerpts I've shared here:

The land haunts the narrative, as you can see. It is in turns cruel and kind, with the characters desperately trying to appease the Earth Mother or Sun God to spare their people for another season, even when livestock and villagers must be sacrificed to achieve this goal. The descriptions of the land mirror this - at times beautiful and joyous, at others harsh and unrelenting, in summer as much as it is in winter.

As someone who is interested in archaeology (as a total amateur with no formal education bar one course, and reading some non-fiction books), I had to throw aside my desire to go, "well, ACTUALLY..." a great many times while reading. There are a lot of inaccuracies. I get the feeling that some of these inaccuracies might have come from disproven theories from when the story was written in the 50s, and some were thrown in for the purpose of weaving a more interesting story. There are a few historical gems to be unearthed from between the pages, though. I was delighted to see a mention of "[...] beakers, and to mark them with cord-patterns and herringbone whorls." Anybody who has seen one of the vessels created by the Beaker Culture in a museum will recognise their description here. The start of the book mentions the Mesolithic flooding of Doggerland (something I am fascinated by), and though it is incredibly historically inaccurate, I liked that the ancient people known as Hunters are likely meant to be a remnant population of Neanderthals judging by their description. Additionally, the Hunter character Asa Wolf sometimes felt more humane than many of the anatomically-modern human characters - he counsels Garroch to be gentler as a ruler, is generally level-headed, shows great loyalty to his dear friend, and even speaks of how with his people,

compared to the often cruel and vengeful anatomically-modern human characters. That was a nice touch. It would have been easy to have written Asa Wolf to be a kind of grunting caveman archetype, and I'm glad the book didn't go in that direction.

This review has used a lot of words to say very little. Would I recommend this book to most people? Probably not. Did I enjoy the book? Yes, I liked the narrative style and the prose itself, despite the incredibly stilted dialogue and the poor depiction of women. Will I read it again? Maybe. Did I immediately suggest it to a friend of mine who is also interested in this era of history? Absolutely, before I'd even finished the book - which only took me a day, as I found I couldn't put it down once I'd started.