All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well: A Novel

A mesmerizing, wonderfully bizarre debut novel featuring one of the most winning oddball characters around: Burt Hecker, medieval enthusiast, mead-addict and widower, who sets off a modern-day Arthurian quest to find his estranged son.ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THINGS SHALL BE WELL is the story of Burt Hecker, a sixty-three-year-old medieval reenactor and his doomed attempt to come to terms with this own history. It is a novel about the different ways we perceive the past, and how none of them can ultimately add up to the present.Using the backdrop of the nine-hundreth birthday celebrations of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Burt accompanies an achorite reenacting female chant workshop from upstate New York to Rhineland, Germany, only to leave them behind and set off on a modern-day Arthurian quest to "rescue" his estranged son, Tristan, from Prague. Jumping between times, continents and histories both real and reenacted, we get to the desperate heart of Burt Hecker, widower and mead-addict, as his losses and crimes accumulate. A remarkably inventive debut novel from a writer with an original sensibility like no other.