Britain just announced to the world that King Richard III's remains have been found, with a reconstruction of his face even made possible. As coincidence would have it, this book features Richard as one of the principal characters. Richard III was not a well-loved monarch and Vanora uses the his...
In her historical fiction debut, “Portrait of an Unknown Woman,” Vanora Bennett has brought a crucial slice of English history to life with compelling characterizations and a keen eye for period detail. Based on the rise and fall of humanist author and statesman Sir Thomas More during the Englis...
I’d messed everything up with my savage tongue and my quick temper. I always did. But when I got to the rough café where I always stopped in the pre-dawn hours, already full of loathing for everything I would find in it – for it was many years since I’d found any tragic charm in the dark poetry o...
He’d ignored the sounds of servants about their business in the house, the wafts of fish stew, the sun streaming into the room through bed curtains he’d forgotten to close. But he couldn’t ignore the cheerful voice yelling from the street: “Hey! Slugabed! My Lord Hastings! Stir yourself! Hey!” Ja...
Catherine didn't try very hard to avoid him. He was always so charming; and the prospect of becoming part of a powerful family cast in his mold was not unattractive. She found herself thinking of the objections to the marriage as Owain's objections, not her own; and dithering over whether to reje...
She felt too humiliated by the way the conversation had ended to want to risk starting it again. She’d made herself utterly vulnerable, and had been answered with a blank stare. She would not beg for Owain Tudor’s affection, she told herself stiffly. She was a Queen.She couldn’t avoid letting him...
Petersburg CHAPTER TEN Horace took off his eyeglasses and put down his tiny paintbrush on his worktable. The goggle-rings left on his cheeks and forehead chafed. Experience told him they would look red and painful if he bothered to go and check in the glass. He looked around him. The other dark...
This afternoon is no different. With every hour that passes, his moments of rage are getting more intense.The stink of wet wool and greasy leather that these men give off turns his stomach. The figures of the forty-odd shire knights and coming up to a hundred burgesses swim and sway before him, a...