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Every week Tanzanite features upcoming historical fiction and history related non-fiction books that have come to her attention and may be of interest to others. Since she has an out of control TBR pile, so should everyone else!
A child born in the plague year of 1348, abandoned and raised within the oppressive walls of a convent, Alice Perrers refused to take the veil, convinced that a greater destiny awaited her. Ambitious and quick witted, she rose above her obscure beginnings to become the infamous mistress of Edward III. But always, essentially, she was alone…
Early in Alice’s life, a chance meeting with royalty changes everything: kindly Queen Philippa, deeply in love with her husband but gravely ill, chooses Alice as a lady-in-waiting. Under the queen’s watchful eyes, Alice dares to speak her mind. She demands to be taken seriously. She even flirts with the dynamic, much older king. But she is torn when her vibrant spirit captures is interest and leaders her to a betrayal she never intended.
In Edward’s private chambers, Alice discovers the pleasures and paradoxes of her position. She is the queen’s confidante, the king’s lover, yet she can rely only on herself. It is a divided role she was destined to play and she vows to play it until the bitter end. Even as she is swept up in Edward’s lavish and magnificent court, amassing wealth and influence for herself, becoming an enemy of his power-hungry son John of Gaunt, and a sparring partner to the resourceful diplomat William de Windsor, she anticipates the day when the political winds will turn against her. For when her detractors voice their hatred, and accusations of treason swirl around her, threatening to destroy everything she has achieved, who will stand by Alice then?
Gilt by Katherine Longshore. Young Adult. US and UK release May 15, 2012.
In the Tudor age, ambition, power and charismatic allure are essential and Catherine Howard has plenty of all three. Not to mention her loyal best friend, Kitty Tylney, to help cover her tracks. Kitty, the abandoned youngest daughter of minor aristocracy, owes everything to Cat – where she is, what she is, even who she is. Friend, flirt, and self-proclaimed Queen of Misrule, Cat reigns supreme in a loyal court of girls under the none-too-watchful eye of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.
But when Cat worms her way into the heart of Henry VIII and becomes Queen of England, Kitty is thrown into the intoxicating Tudor Court. It’s a world of glittering jewels and elegant costumes, of gossip and deception. As the Queen’s right-hand-woman, Kitty goes from the girl nobody noticed to being caught between two men – the object of her affection and the object of her desire.
Over the course of one gaudy, chaotic year, Kitty is forced to learn the difference between trust and loyalty, love and lust, secrets and treason. And when the tide begins to turn against the young Queen, Kitty discovers all too late the true weight of the diamond collar around Cat’s neck.
Almost two hundred years have elapsed since the Crusader armies took Jerusalem. Now it is the turn of the Saracen to seek revenge and send an overwhelming force against the last Christian enclave in the Holy Land. In Acre, the defenders await their fate. Knight and bishop, mercenary and merchant, all will be tested and all may perish. For this is the endgame. No quarter will be given and no mercy shown.
William of Beaujeu, Grand Master of the Templars, will stop at little to secure the city and preserve his legendary military order. He knows that final judgement is approaching and that time is running out. But among the garrison are allies - the adventurer de Flor, Theobald, the young Hospitaller, the court dwarf Amethyst, the camel master Selim and the orphan boy and spy Benedict - who must stay alive in the chaos to be unleashed. In their midst prowl the feared Assassins and sinister enemies from among a rabble army of Italians. Deserted by the pope and the princes of Europe, it seems as if Acre faces annihilation - but perhaps something can still be salvaged from perdition . . .
Master and God by Lindsey Davis. UK release March 15, 2012.
AD81. The Roman Emperor Domitian seizes power. Afflicted by classic paranoia, the self-styled Master and God sees enemies everywhere - and he is right. The Senate loathes him, his advisers are terrified, he cannot trust his wife and barbarians menace the frontiers. As he vents his suspicions, no one is safe...
Gaius Vinius Clodianus survives physical and mental scars to reach high rank in the Praetorian Guard. Flavia Lucilla tends the privileged women at court; when Domitian's inherited talent unravels into madness, she loses her patron cruelly. In the haven of their shared apartment, Gaius and Lucilla find solace together, yearning for normality while living in a Reign of Terror.
Moves against Domitian are begun by his own household. Lucilla has to watch Gaius choose between love for her and risking death; between his sworn duty to protect the Emperor and killing Domitian for the good of Rome.
The plot careers close to exposure. Rome teeters on the brink of its Golden Age. A group of unlikely conspirators must now act with decency and courage, whatever the personal cost.
Master and God is the epic story of a despot whose contemporaries wrote him out of history. Told in Lindsey Davis' sardonic style, it is an intimate portrait of resilience, friendship and love.
The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson by Kevin Hayes. Non-fiction. UK release June 2012.
Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer, a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president. In The Road to Monticello, Kevin J. Hayes fills this important gap by offering a lively account of Jefferson's intellectual development, focusing on the books that exerted the most profound influence on his writing and thinking.
Moving chronologically through Jefferson's life, Hayes reveals the full range and depth of Jefferson's literary passions, from the popular "small books" sold by traveling chapmen, such as The History of Fortunatas and The History of Tom Thumb that enthralled him as a child, to his lifelong love of Aesop's Fables and Robinson Crusoe, his engagement with Horace, Ovid, Virgil and other writers of classical antiquity, and his deep affinity with the melancholy verse of Ossian, the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior-poet. Drawing on Jefferson's letters, journals, and commonplace books, Hayes offers a wealth of new scholarship on the literary culture of colonial America, identifies previously unknown books held in Jefferson's libraries, reconstructs Jefferson's investigations of such different fields of knowledge as law, history, philosophy, and natural science and, most importantly, lays bare the ideas which informed the thinking of America's first great intellectual.
So many good sounding books... So little time!
October 26, 2011 7:22 AM
Wow, I didn't think it was possible to write another book that featured Catherine Howard! Sounds interesting though.
October 26, 2011 7:55 AM
I really like the cover of the upcoming Anne O'Brien release.
October 26, 2011 5:32 PM