BOOKS

Levitation For Beginners

It’s 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch Angel Delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackerjack and Jackanory, ‘Layla’ and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos.

But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school, pretty as a picture and full of gossip and speculation, as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled but Deborah and is wary and keeps her distance. That same week, eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That’s bad enough, Deborah thinks, but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he’s the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne, and Deborah fears what she’ll make of her mum. It’s good to be different, her mum often says; but not, Deborah knows, too different…

So, Deborah changes tactics, keeping her friends close and enemy closer, even stepping up for some of Sarah-Jayne’s levitation sessions. Then she’s invited to Sarah-Jayne’s lovely house, where she meets her charming family and encounters Sarah-Jayne’s big sister’s fiance, Max, which is when she senses that all isn’t quite as it seems…

Read the first few pages of Levitation For Beginners…

BOOKS

The Testimony Of Alys Twist

I remembered it once said, when I was small, that I would go far. Whoever had spoken over my head had been right, I thought, because just twenty or so years later here I was, arriving to work at the palace, and no servant gets further than this…

1553: deeply divided England rejoices as the rightful heir, Mary Tudor, sweeps to power on a tide of populist goodwill. But the people should have been careful what they wished for: Mary’s mission is to turn back time to an England of old. Within weeks there is widespread rebellion in favour of her heir, her half-sister, princess Elizabeth, who is everything that Mary isn’t. From now on, Elizabeth will have to use her considerable guile just to stay alive.

Orphan Alys Twist has come a long way – further than she ever dared hope – to work as a laundress at the royal wardrobe. There she meets Bel, daughter of the queen’s tailor, and seems to have arrived at her own happy ending.

But in a world where appearance is everything, a laundress is in a unique position to see the truth of people’s lives, and Alys is pressed into service as a spy in the errant princess’s household. Alys herself, though, is hardly whiter than white, and when the princess is arrested she must make a dangerous choice.

A few streets away from Bel’s window, the Thames would be supine and moon-dazzled, but in the hush at Richmond I heard it churning and gurgling, working on bodies that had one way or another ended up in it, a long gut sluicing skin from bone…

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BOOKS

The Lady Of Misrule

I saw her file it away: a good Catholic girl come to supervise her in her detention. Every girl in England now, under the circumstances, made sure to be a good Catholic girl. Except her, of course. And, if only she knew it, me.

Elizabeth Tilney surprised even herself by volunteering for the job of companion to Lady Jane Grey, who has been imprisoned in the Tower after only nine days as queen. All Elizabeth knows is she’s keen to be away from home; she could do with some breathing space. And anyway, it won’t be for long: everyone knows Jane will go free as soon as the victorious new queen, Mary Tudor, is crowned. Which is a good thing, because the two sixteen-year-olds, cooped up together in a room in the Gentleman-gaoler’s house, couldn’t be less compatible. Protestant Jane is an icily self-composed idealist, and Catholic Elizabeth is… well, anything but.

They are united, though, by their disdain for the seventeen-year-old to whom Jane has recently been married off: petulant, noisily-aggrieved Guildford Dudley, held prisoner in a neighbouring tower and keen to pursue his prerogative of a daily walk with his wife.

As Jane’s captivity extends into the increasingly turbulent last months of 1553, the two girls learn to live with each other with mutual respect and liking, but Elizabeth finds herself drawn into the difficult relationship between the newlyweds. And when, at the turn of the year, events take an unexpected and dangerous direction, her new-found loyalties are put to the test.

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BOOKS

The May Bride

“I didn’t stand a chance: looking back over thirteen years, that’s what I see. In that very first instant, I was won over, and of course I was: I was fifteen and had been nowhere and done nothing, whereas Katherine was twenty-one and yellow-silk-clad and just married to the golden boy. Only a few years later, I’d be blaming myself for not having somehow seen… but seen what, really? What – really, honestly – was there to see, when she walked into Hall? She was just a girl, a lovely, light-stepping girl, smiling that smile of hers, and, back then, as giddy with goodwill as the rest of us…”

Jane Seymour is a shy, dutiful fifteen-year-old when her eldest brother, Edward, brings his bride home to Wolf Hall. Katherine Filliol is the perfect match for Edward, as well as being a breath of fresh air for the Seymour family, and Jane is captivated. Over the course of a long, hot country summer, the two become close friends and allies, while Edward is busy building alliances at court and advancing his career.

However, only two years later, the family is torn apart by a dreadful allegation made by Edward against his wife. The repercussions for all the Seymours are incalculable, not least for Katherine herself. When Jane is sent away, to serve Catherine of Aragon, she is forced to witness another wife being put aside, with terrible consequences. Changed forever by what happened to Katherine Filliol, Jane comes to understand that in a world where power is held entirely by men, there is a way in which she can still hold true to herself.

“We were trespassers in this night-time world. As I strode after Katherine, my nightdress clamoured around my knees and shins. Shadows were everywhere, sleek, their clarity unnerving. Her own shadow ahead of me slid below her like a fish just beneath the water’s surface, quicksilver but blunt-nosed, disturbingly insensate. Above it, though, her steps were jaunty tossing of ankle bones as if they were handfuls of pebbles. I was awed by her purposefulness – she was so very full of life – and had the sudden, dizzying notion that she might be carrying a baby: the start of a baby like a pearl inside her. It seemed to me, then, that nothing had happened at Wolf Hall for as long as I could remember, but now, marvellously, anything could happen.”

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BOOKS

Confessions Of Katherine Howard

A Richard & Judy Pick.

I wish I could go back, patter over the lavish carpets to tap us on the shoulders, whisper in our ears and get us out of there alive. Little did we know it, but, that night, we were already ghosts in our own lives.


When twelve-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk’s household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious of her. The two girls couldn’t be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it’s Cat in whom Katherine confides and, despite herself, Cat is drawn to her. Summoned to court at seventeen, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious love affair.

Within months, the king has set aside his new Dutch wife for Katherine. The future seems assured for the new queen and her maid-in-waiting, although Cat would feel more confident if Katherine hadn’t embarked on an affair with one of the king’s favoured attendants, Thomas Culpeper. However, for a blissful year and a half, it seems that Katherine can have everything she wants. But then allegations are made about her girlhood love affairs. Desperately frightened, Katherine recounts a version of events which implicates Francis but which Cat knows to be a lie. With Francis in the Tower, Cat alone knows the whole truth of Katherine Howard’s past…

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BOOKS

The Queen’s Sorrow

The public joy with which Mary Tudor, England’s first ruling queen, was crowned soon sours as religion splits the country. Then her new husband, Philip of Spain, makes it painfully clear that he cares nothing for her. Lonely and depressed, she begins to vent her anguish on her people and England becomes a place of persecution and terror. Her fall from grace is witnessed by Rafael, Spanish sundial maker and part of the Prince’s flamboyant entourage. He becomes close to the queen and his life – and new found love – will be caught up in the chaos that follows.

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BOOKS

The Sixth Wife

Clever, level-headed Katherine Parr survived four years of marriage to Henry V111. But when Thomas Seymour won her heart not even a year after the old king’s death, their hasty union undid a lifetime of caution.

Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, is Kate Parr’s best friend. An unwilling witness to the dowager queen’s late-blossoming love, she harbours suspicions of Kate’s handsome, ambitious new husband. But as she is drawn deeper into the web of politics ensnaring her oldest friend, it becomes clear she has her own dark tale to tell. For if Thomas might betray his wife for power, then sharp, canny Cathy might betray her for passion.

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BOOKS

The Queen Of Subtleties

Lucy Cornwallis is Henry V111’s confectioner, the only woman in a kitchen staffed by two hundred men. She sculpts valuable sugar into ‘subtleties’, the centrepieces for royal celebrations, and keeps her head down in a court riven by intrigue. One day, she has an unusual visitor, someone curious to meet the creator of the famed sculptures: Mark Smeaton, singer and musician. Like Lucy, he is a talented commoner who has found royal favour. During a frenetic, troubled year at court – the final year of Anne’s Boleyn’s brief reign – they become close. Secretly, and oblivious to the sinister machinations within Henry’s circle, Lucy begins to build hopes of a future together, a life away from the kitchens.

Anne Boleyn’s rise has changed the history of England and she has made enemies of all but her favoured few, ‘her boys’. Politically astute, intensely ambitious and uncompromising, she had easily caught the youthful King’s heart, but powerful forces are now gathering to make her pay for her prize – and Lucy Cornwallis is unwittingly in danger of giving them the means to do so.

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BOOKS

Commencing Our Descent

Having had more than her share of misfortune, Sadie Summerfield seems to have finally ended up lucky, she has the perfect homelife. For the first time in a very long time, she has a future. So when another man, a cautious, subdued man, so very different from her own warm-hearted husband, drifts into Sadie’s life, she must ask herself: is she ready to risk everything for the sake of love? And besides, shouldn’t affairs begin with a shiver of danger, with the thrill of the chase, rather than this?

BOOKS

Tenterhooks

Stories include ‘White Goods’, ‘Sync’, ‘Guts for Garters’, ‘Stood Up and Thinking of England’, and ‘Slipping The Clutch’.

In ‘Slipping The Clutch’, Miranda walks out of Boots one day into the beautiful, beloved, fast-living Uncle Robbie who, years beforehand, taught her to drive in his Alfa Romeo and then died in his Lagonda…

It was said in my family that Uncle Robbie cut a dash…I had never seen a beautiful man, before; or not one who was not made from celluloid. His cheekbones were so prominent that they seemed to precede him into rooms. They almost frightened me. His eyes were the colour of shallow water, they had the shine of water and water’s trick of moving without going anywhere. His smiles slipped lazily, could have been whispers that I did not quite catch. I was an only child, and, until Uncle Robbie, men had been mere teachers or dads: men who were strapped with bulky watches and tied into grim shoes with socks which seemed wrong, socks which were somehow both too short and too long…