The Adventurer

Early sixteenth-century Europe. Mikael Karvajalka, an intelligent but restless young Finn of uncertain birth, leaves home with his companion Antti and is drawn into a continent being reordered by religion, dynastic ambition and war.

His travels carry him through Sweden, Paris, Reformation Germany and Italy. He encounters the German Peasants’ War, persecution and witch trials, the contest between Christian and Ottoman powers, and finally the Sack of Rome in 1527. The novel uses Mikael’s picaresque rise and repeated compromises to show how ordinary lives are caught in the political and religious violence of the age.