Elizabethan English

When Maeve McQuaid loses her boyfriend and her gardening job in one fell swoop, fate intervenes in the shape of Beth, an elderly lady carrying a gap-year-size backpack. She turns out to be the owner of the mysterious Druid's Oak Farm in North Yorkshire and offers her a job. The farm is an artist's community which has become tired and run down, much like its inhabitants. The Elizabethan building needs to be saved but Beth is slowly going bankrupt. Can Maeve make a formal garden from an overgrown shambles? Can her enthusiasm lift everyone out of their lethargy or will they rise up against her...

The Crow’s Gift is a book with two separate stories set centuries apart. One is of a couple living in post-Victorian England, a time of formality and fashion, when motorcars first appeared on English roads. The other takes place three hundred years earlier, when men wore puffy breeches, and it took months to make a lady’s gown. One is a story of love lost and rekindled; the other of love ignited by the fires of youth. One is a tale of friendship, family, and the search for lost treasure; the other of superstition, witchcraft, and betrayal. How can these two widely disparate tales ...

In the final days of World War II, Catherine Hastings meets the man she wants to marry. Flight surgeon Jonathan Brandon isn't just handsome - he's everything Catherine could hope for in her betrothed. But her dream of a happily ever after is shattered when Jonnie vanishes before their wedding, leaving Catherine bereft, broken-hearted, and with a lifetime of unanswered questions.

The Tudors are England's most notorious royal family. But, as Leanda de Lisle's gripping new history reveals, they are a family still more extraordinary than the one we thought we knew. The Tudor canon typically starts with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 before speeding on to Henry VIII and the Reformation. But this leaves out the family's obscure Welsh origins and the ordinary man known as Owen Tudor who would fall (literally) into a queen's lap - and later her bed.

There is untold history of Tudor England - the history of the several million subjects of their famous kings and queens. What did ordinary people do all day, in their homes, their work, their leisure and travel? An Accidental History of Tudor England explores the history of everyday life, and everyday death.

What if you were asked to die for someone you had never met? The Catholic Queen, Bloody Mary, hates her sister and rival, the Princess Elizabeth. To protect the Protestant princess, a loyal nobleman spirits her into hiding, leaving a base-born lookalike in her place. Bess Neville is King Henry's daughter, too, but she wasn't born to the gilded halls of power. She grew up poor, raised in a shabby house on the Thames, abused by the aunt who resented having to raise her sister's orphaned brat, but Bess bears enough of a resemblance to her namesake for ambitious men to exploit. Bess risks a ...

In the heat of their midsummer night’s dream, they tasted the ecstasy of a love more exciting than any staged masquerade. Banished from Queen Elizabeth’s court for a murder he didn’t commit, Nicholas Leighton escaped capture by assuming a new appearance and identity. Joining Shakespeare’s acting company he was thrust into the dangerous and deceptive world of London’s theater, where illusions defied the senses and false identities were commonplace. Betrayed by the golden-haired beauty he had pursued, Nicholas vowed he would trust no woman, until lovely Alandra Thatcher, the stage ...

When the predator becomes the prey… blood will run in the gutters of Tudor London. Myles Devereux rules the streets. A ruthless gangster in the lawless underbelly of Tudor London, he controls the brothels, the taverns, the enforcers—and everyone knows not to cross him. But someone just did. His bookkeeper turns up dead. His debtors are being picked off one by one. And now the sheriff’s men are at his door, accusing him of the murders. Then Richard Fitzwarren, the Queen’s cold-eyed emissary, brings worse: a heresy charge—and death by fire This is no random attack. It’s a setup. ...

Alexander “Sander” Cooke is the most celebrated “boy player” in the Chamberlain’s Men, William Shakespeare’s theatre company. Indeed, Sander’s androgynous beauty and deft portrayal of female roles have made him the toast of London, and his companionship is sought by noblewomen and -men alike. And yet, now at the height of his fame, he teeters on the cusp of adulthood, his future uncertain. Often, he wishes he could stop time and remain a boy forever.

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North, vows to avenge him. He is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety. Against them is the queen, passionate, proud, and strong-willed and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.

David Attenborough. Marcus Rashford. Diana Dors. Winston Churchill. Elizabeth David. Bob Geldof. Zaha Hadid. Frank Crichlow. Quentin Crisp. Dusty Springfield. Captain Tom. Who made modern Britain the country it is today? How do we sum up the kind of people we are? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans? In this wonderfully told history, spanning back to when Queen Elizabeth became queen in 1953, Andrew Marr traces the people who have made Britain the country it is today.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

An aging, vain, lonely, pretentious and failed indie writer is forced to give a glowing, five-star review to 'Vampire Odyssey', the worst book ever written. "Not your typical gothic tale—brace yourself for a hilariously twisted parody that will have you laughing from dusk till dawn! This book turns the vampire genre on its head with wit, humor, and a touch of absurdity. Dive in for a wild, irreverent ride!" --Christine Jax, author of Who's Building the Ark? How to Manage Through Hell and High Water

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ "Bad Blood is a fantastic historical fiction novel that does not shy away from the dark complications of the world," - Reedsy Discovery A gripping fast-paced historical fiction adventure set in rebellious Ireland in the 1590s. Eunan Maguire lives in a small village in Fermanagh. He is mistreated by his parents and then taken to Enniskillen as a hostage to ensure his father’s loyalty. He returns after being trained as a Galloglass warrior to confront his parents and to ensure his father pledges to the prospective new Maguire. But before he can do that the English raid ...

On a Sunday afternoon in May 1592, Jane Mellor is raped on the village green by the comedian of a group of strolling players. Her husband is traumatised by the attack and Jane is forced to flee the village to escape being tried for witchcraft. She sets out disguised as a boy with her catatonic husband, in pursuit of the comic and intent on revenge. However Jane quickly finds that the dangers from marauding thieves and footpads, the savagery of the law and prisons are being compounded by more sinister activities.

8 February 1601. The personal troops of a disgraced royal favourite mount up and ride on the City of London. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and his lieutenant, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton are in open revolt against Queen Elizabeth I and her Government. Richard Palmer is swept up in the action. He calls himself an investigator, others call him an informer. Chief Minister Cecil has need for one - the Queen is enraged by the revival of a play at the Globe about deposing a reigning monarch in favour of a populist rival. Was Richard II meant to get the mob in the mood for regicide? ...

In the reign of Edward VI, Amy, a beautiful country girl of eighteen, has a chance meeting with Robert Dudley, the son of a wealthy nobleman, which leads to their marriage. When the boy king Edward dies, fame, fortune and a life at court are disastrously cut short by the involvement of Amy's new family in the plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England. Facing financial ruin Amy tries to support her imprisoned husband - only to be betrayed by him soon after his release. Gradually abandoned by Robert, Amy now begins to fear for her life as forces beyond her control seem determined ...

Grace O'Malley, daughter of a clan chief in the far west of Ireland, went from marriage at fifteen to piracy on the high seas. She soon had a fleet of galleys under her commander, but her three decades of plundering, kidnapping, murder and mayhem came to a close in 1586, when she was captured and sentenced to hang. Saved from the scaffold by none other than Queen Elizabeth herself—another powerful woman in a man's world—Grace's life took another extraordinary turn, when it was rumored she had become intelligencer for the queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham.

Drawing on the records of national and regional archives as well as archaeological remains, James Clark explores the little-known lives of the last men and women who lived in England's monasteries before the Reformation. Clark challenges received wisdom, showing that buildings were not immediately demolished and Henry VIII's subjects were so attached to the religious houses that they kept fixtures and fittings as souvenirs. This rich, vivid history brings back into focus the prominent place of abbeys, priories, and friaries in the lives of the English people.

S. J. Parris returns with the next Giordano Bruno mystery, set inside Queen Elizabeth’s palace and steeped in period atmospherics and the strange workings of the occult. It is the year of the Great Conjunction, when the two most powerful planets, Jupiter and Saturn, align - an astrologi­cal phenomenon that occurs once every thousand years and heralds the death of one age and the dawn of another. The streets of London are abuzz with predictions of horrific events to come, possibly even the death of Queen Elizabeth.