Gaurav Garg

He was the greatest warrior of the Viking Age. He sold his loyalty for silver, but his oath was bound in blood. In the year 1009, Thorkell the Tall, Jarl of the legendary Jomsvikings, leads a great heathen horde to the shores of Anglo-Saxon England. For him, it is not a war of conquest; it is a business. He is a pragmatist, a merchant of fear, here to value a weak kingdom and collect his payment in silver and blood.
His campaign of terror culminates in the sack of Canterbury, a victory that brings him untold wealth but ends in a crisis of faith when his undisciplined army murders the Archbishop Ælfheah. Disgusted by the chaos, Thorkell makes the first of his great betrayals: he defects. With his most loyal Thingmen, he sells his sword to the English King, Æthelred the Unready, becoming the paid protector of the realm he so recently shattered.
This new contract, however, places him on a collision course with his past. A new, greater armada is coming, led by Cnut the Great-the cold, hawk-eyed, and ruthless prince Thorkell himself raised as a foster-son (fóstri), bound by an oath he considers more sacred than any contract. Torn between his silver and his sacred bond, Thorkell chooses kin, abandoning England and becoming the chief architect of Cnut's war against the heroic Saxon king, Edmund Ironside.
At the decisive Battle of Assandun, Thorkell's tactics and the treachery of the spider-like Eadric Streona win the crown for his foster-son. Rewarded with the Earldom of East Anglia and the regency of Denmark, Thorkell stands at the pinnacle of the new North Sea Empire as the ultimate Kingmaker. But the Jarl, who taught his pupil that "a King's heart must be a stone, " soon learns the terrible price of that lesson.
Cnut, now an Emperor, cannot abide a subject whose shadow is as long as his own, and the master pragmatist finds himself out-maneuvered, disarmed, and retired to a gilded cage. Based on the epic, true story of Thorkell the Tall, A Land With No Kings is a saga of brutal shield walls, complex political intrigue, and the agonizing conflict between honor, pragmatism, and loyalty. It is a journey from the heart of a Viking warrior to the soul of a man who, having won and lost an empire, seeks the one thing no king can ever give him: a land with no kings.