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Cover of Carthage Ascendant

Carthage Ascendant

core novel 2000 Ash: A Secret History

Record

First published2000
Original language EN
Work typenovel
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.86 (332 ratings, collected 2026-09-13)
First-edition ISBN9780380805501
Internal chronology2

Synopsis

Carthage Ascendant, published by Mary Gentle in 2000, is the second volume of the Book of Ash, continuing directly from A Secret History. With the Carthaginian invasion of Burgundy well underway, the mercenary captain Ash is summoned to a parley with Leofric's Faris, the mysterious and unnervingly familiar general leading Carthage's forces. Their meeting exposes an unsettling connection between the two commanders that forces Ash to reconsider everything she believed about the voice that has guided her since childhood. Captured by Carthaginian forces not long afterward, Ash must find a way to survive and eventually escape captivity while the modern-day scholars translating her story continue to uncover documents suggesting the history being told does not match the world they know, deepening the novel's blend of military fantasy and alternate-history mystery.

Where it sits

Notes

  • From the series record (Ash: A Secret History (The Book of Ash)): One continuous novel, published as a single volume in the UK (Gollancz, 2000) and split into these four US paperback volumes (Eos, 1999-2000); each volume is catalogued separately here since each was published, sold, and rated individually, the same treatment already applied to The Lord of the Rings' three volumes.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.

Sources

← Ash: A Secret History dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.