Lion Heart

A contemporary tale of belief, identity, the nature of fiction and the power of romance, Lion Heart is Justin Cartwright’s most inventive and powerful work to date

''Glorious … Cartwright has the ability to elicit laughter and pity at once, while at the same time evoking a scene or atmosphere with effortless precision'' Guardian

''Part love story, part grail quest, part historical detective novel … Cartwright carries the reader through all this with the energy of his writing; people and places become so real that even the most fantastic twists in the plot become believable'' Financial Times

Richard Cathar was named after his father’s hero, Richard the Lionheart. Richard remembers his recently-deceased father, Alaric, as a delusional hippy, who saw himself as an intellectual and historian.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Richard travels to Jerusalem where he falls deeply in love with Noor, a beautiful but mysterious Canadian-Arab journalist. When Noor is kidnapped on assignment in Cairo and the facts of her capture emerge, Richard stumbles upon an important document, one that could rewrite not just the history of the Crusades, but his father’s and his own as well.