Hana Samek Norton


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Topics of conversation:

  • Current interest in history and historical fiction
  • Focusing on whether historical fiction is fact or fiction
  • Teaching history in technological era
  • Middle ages appearing in SciFi and Fantasy genres

Hana Samek Norton was born in the former Czechoslovakia , a small country packed with history. That history eventually caught up with her and her family and they came as political refugees to Canada . She has a MA in history from the University of Western Ontario and a Ph. D. from the University of New Mexico .

She currently lives in New Mexico where she sometimes teaches her favorite subject, delves into its more serious aspects, and now writes the sort of stuff that she likes to read: fiction that is historical, romantic, and researched.

The Sixth Surrender: A Novel

Hana Samek Norton
Plume (2010)
ISBN 9780452296237
Reviewed by Marissa Libbit for Reader Views (09/10

Read the review on ReaderViews.com


Synopsis: In the final years of Aliénor of Aquitaine, the queen duchess launches a deadly dynastic chess game to safeguard the crowns of Normandy and England for her last surviving son, John Plantagenet. Caught in the middle is Sister Eustace, Aliénor’s young scribe, who must decide between her beloved home and an unthinkable marriage to a ruthless mercenary. With her promising debut, THE SIXTH SURRENDER (A Plume Original/August 2010), novelist Hana Samek Norton transports readers to thirteenth century France with vivid period details and rich storytelling certain to appeal to historical fiction lovers.

Sister Eustace, born Lady Juliana, the last of the de Charnais line, is about to pledge her herself to the queen’s cause. Learned yet humble, passionate yet wholly innocent. Juliana has a singular determination—to possess her rightful home, the viscounty of Tilliéres. Juliana prays for a man who is honorable, kind and literate. Instead she is promised to Guérin de Lasalle, a worldly though landless mercenary with a blackened soul. The couple enters the union with just one shared desire, to put an end to the marriage.

As the queen’s prophecy, “Honor, like love, comes in many guises,” echoes through Juliana’s first days as a wife, the race intensifies to secure Plantagenet rule. Schemes by traitorous lords and the mystery of Lasalle’s past could cost John his thrones—and Juliana her life.

Hana Samek Norton’s THE SIXTH SURRENDER is a sweeping medieval saga that hails the debut of a new talent in Historical fiction.

The Sixth Surrender won 1st Place-Historical Fiction in the New Mexico Book Awards 2010