This is an epic story for readers young and old. Set in a mythical, feudal Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay.
Clea (Alexandria Quartet; Book 4) by Lawrence Durrell
Set amid the corrupt glamour and multiplying intrigues of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s, the novels of Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" (of which this is the fourth) follow the shifting alliances - sexual, cultural and political - of a group of quite varied characters.
Robert Morkot traces the growth of Greece from a series of often conflicting city-states, each with its own colonial outposts as far from home as Spain and Tunisia, to loosely knit alliances that waged huge conflicts against the Persian empire--and, as in the case of the Peloponnesian War, against each other. CORRECT LINK added by hermanomax
