Runestone

By: Don Coldsmith

Narrated by: Jonathan Beville

Length: 24 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

A grand historical adventure pitting two warrior castes against one another.

They set sail from Norway, two swift-moving longships and their handpicked crews, following the route navigated by the legendary Leif Ericson. But for young shipmaster Nils Thorsson and his fellow Norsemen, the real journey begins when they push on into the uncharted continent of Vinland.

There the explorers revel in the chance to penetrate a virgin land—until they trespass on the grounds of a primitive people who have seen enough of the light-hairs' cruelty to believe they are too dangerous to ignore. In one swift dawn raid, they deal with the invaders by letting go a swarm of fiery arrows. Only three men from the sailing party escape: the intrepid Nils Thorsson, the hardened seaman Svenson, and an enigmatic native guide called Odin. Now, stranded in the wilderness with their one-eyed guide, Thomson and Svenson know that to survive they must master the ways of war, of the hunt—and of a proud and fearless people.

©2021 Wolfpack Publishing (P)2022 Wolfpack Publishing

Critic reviews

“A mythically powerful story of the earliest European exploration of North America. Runestone is Don Coldsmith’s finest work to date.” (Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, authors of Flight of the Hawk)

Read This One Instead

I read this book about 15, 20 years ago and remember enjoying it; listening to it, not so much. I suppose what made the reading easy and the listening difficult was that I could skim over all the repetition and long, in depth asides. The 30 second advance button is an imprecise tool and by the time you've used a few hundred it just doesn't seem worth it. It wasn't too bad a listen but after a few hours, maybe more than a few, I finally gave just it up.