Richie Cathar's father, Alaric, was a renaissance man: an intellectual, explorer, archaeologist and historian. He was also a man of the sixties: a fantasist, absentee parent and drug abuser. Alaric named his son after his hero, Richard, Coeur de Lion, but left him little when he died apart from conflicting memories. Now Richie, thirty-something, is in search of his own role... Following his father's trail to the Holy Land to research the Art of the Medieval Latin Kingdom, Richie's quest - to uncover the fate of Christianity's most sacred relic and the truth about his father - takes him from the high-table intrigue of Oxford to the imposing Crusader castles of Jordan, and into a passionate love affair with Noor, a Canadian-Arab journalist, whose fate will become entwined with Richie's own. Shot through with Justin Cartwright's trademark sharp observation and heartbreaking drama, Lion Heart is a thrilling, romantic and original work from one of our finest novelists.

Richard Cathar was named after his father's hero, Richard the Lionheart. Richard remembers his recently-deceased father, Alaric, as a delusional hippy, who saw himself as an intellectual and historian. Alaric believed that Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood had met and he found - and lost - a document which was to prove this. In his father's footsteps, Richard travels to Jerusalem where he falls deeply in love with an Arab Canadian journalist; a few weeks later she is kidnapped in Cairo. In the course of writing about the Crusades, Richard discovers that the True Cross, lost to Saladin in 1187, was recovered by a small band of Richard's knights. He embarks on a quest of his own, both to find the True Cross, and to discover whether or not everything in his father's mind was a fantasy. It is an utterly original novel, exciting, romantic, funny and profound.

A madcap revision of Richard Coeur de Lion