A history that spans more than half a millennium, The Anglo-Saxons is nothing less than a quest for England's origins. This is the story of our island at its most strange and evocative period – the time of the Anglo-Saxons.

Marc Morris’s brilliant new book will take its readers from an alien world of slaves, temples, villas, druids and amphorae, to a familiar landscape of shires and boroughs, villages, parish churches and minsters; from the worship of vanished gods like Thor and Woden to the veneration of saints – Cuthbert, Alban, Edmund – who still recognised today; from a population who spoke Latin and Celtic, to one whose language was recognizably the ancestor of the English that is spoken today.