Her husband is missing, yet in 1648, a woman is defined by her husband and she is “not a widow nor a wife”, so when good fortune comes to her son, there are innuendos that she conjures up healing with more than the herbs she mixes or worse with curses. She’s a healer who grows herbs for medicine, delivers babies and works at times for the more well off residents as does her thirteen year old daughter and son. It’s a hard life for Alinor and her children who live on Sealsea Island, off the south coast of England, the tidelands “neither sea nor shore”. She welcomes visitors to her site Philippa's Facebook page: In 2018, she was awarded an Honorary Platinum Award by Nielsen for achieving significant lifetime sales across her entire book output. Philippa is a member of the Society of Authors and in 2016, was presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Historical Fiction Award by the Historical Writers’ Association. She is a fellow of the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff and an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of London.

She holds honorary degrees from Teesside University and the University of Sussex. Now a recognised authority on women’s history, Philippa graduated from the University of Sussex and received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Regent and was made Alumna of the Year in 2009. Her flair for blending history and imagination developed into a signature style and Philippa went on to write many bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen. She wrote her first ever novel, Wideacre, when she was completing her PhD in eighteenth-century literature and it sold worldwide, heralding a new era for historical fiction. Philippa Gregory is one of the world’s foremost historical novelists. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.Īlinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. A dangerous time for a woman to be different.

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