I found it very easily in the nearest public library; it was sitting there in general fiction between Lapsing (1986), which I read in the stacks, and A Desert in Bohemia (2000), which I took home, and at least one other adult novel that was not Knowledge of Angels. You will have to let me know what you think of it!
You might also be interested in The Emperor's Winding Sheet (1974), which is the novel I read before this one; it may be the only novel, YA or otherwise, I've read about the fall of Constantinople. Shipwrecked, starved, with a smattering of schoolroom Latin and no Greek at all, a boy from Bristol falls out of a bitter orange tree at the feet of Constantine XI Palaeologos and finds himself taken up by the new-made Emperor as a combination talisman/ward/pawn in a suitably Byzantine power play; he is called now Vrethiki, lucky find, and so long as the Emperor lives, he must remain at his side. The reader knows already that this will be much shorter than Vrethiki believes. The whole book is like a mosaic, bright and dark images upheld. And it is not anything like her Athenian fifth century; she writes different times beautifully and individually, in their own voices, which I'm not sure everyone who takes on historical fiction can (though they should) do.
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I found it very easily in the nearest public library; it was sitting there in general fiction between Lapsing (1986), which I read in the stacks, and A Desert in Bohemia (2000), which I took home, and at least one other adult novel that was not Knowledge of Angels. You will have to let me know what you think of it!
You might also be interested in The Emperor's Winding Sheet (1974), which is the novel I read before this one; it may be the only novel, YA or otherwise, I've read about the fall of Constantinople. Shipwrecked, starved, with a smattering of schoolroom Latin and no Greek at all, a boy from Bristol falls out of a bitter orange tree at the feet of Constantine XI Palaeologos and finds himself taken up by the new-made Emperor as a combination talisman/ward/pawn in a suitably Byzantine power play; he is called now Vrethiki, lucky find, and so long as the Emperor lives, he must remain at his side. The reader knows already that this will be much shorter than Vrethiki believes. The whole book is like a mosaic, bright and dark images upheld. And it is not anything like her Athenian fifth century; she writes different times beautifully and individually, in their own voices, which I'm not sure everyone who takes on historical fiction can (though they should) do.