When Lady Aude encounters Eleanor of Aquitaine on the wharfs of Antioch, the queen is on crusade but Aude is returning home. The daughter of a French crusader and an Armenian noble, Aude grew up on an estate outside of Jerusalem. To earn her place in the queen's entourage, Aude begins to tell her own story, how violence and an ill-fated marriage forced her to leave the land of her birth and how she vowed to return almost three decades later. Across those years, from the Holy Land to Flande...

The last thing Gebirga of Flanders remembers seeing is the argument between her parents that ended in her mother's death. In the years since, she has learned to negotiate her family's castle of Gistel as a blind woman but everyone assumes that one day her home will be the convent founded in her mother's honor. An accidental encounter offers another path, and Gebirga flees her callous family with a pack of pilgrims that includes a count's daughter bound for marriage, two clerics writing a g...

In Her Father's Daughter**, Lucy K. Pick considers a group of royal women in the early medieval kingdoms of the Asturias and of León-Castilla; their lives say a great deal about structures of power and the roles of gender and religion within the early Iberian kingdoms.** Pick examines these women, all daughters of kings, as members of networks of power that work variously in parallel, in concert, and in resistance to some forms of male power, and ...

Longlisted for the 2011 MAN BOOKER PRIZE for Fiction, FAR TO GO is a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family's epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy.Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the German forces in Czechoslovakia. Desperate to avoid deportation, the Bauers flee to Prague with their six-year-old son, Pepik, an...

The number one bestselling phenomenonJULY 1209, Carcassonne. Seventeen-year-old Alaïs Pelletier is given a mysterious book by her father, which he claims contains the secret of the true Grail. Although Alaïs cannot understand the strange words and symbols hidden within, she knows that her destiny lies in keeping the secret of the labyrinth safe.JULY 2005. Archaeologist Alice Tanner discovers two skeletons in a forgotten cav...

The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the number one bestseller Vagabond, this is the third instalment in Bernard Cornwell's Grail Quest series.In 1347 the English capture Calais and the war with France is suspended by a truce.But for Thomas of Hookton, the hero of Harlequin and Vagabond, there is no end to the fighting. He is pursuing the grail, the most sacred of Christendom's relics, and is sent to his ancestral homeland, Gascony, to engineer a confrontation with his deadl...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“The great Crusader king Richard the Lionheart comes alive in all his complex splendor in this masterpiece of medieval tapestry.”—Margaret GeorgeA.D. 1189. After the death of his father, Henry II, and the early demise of two of his brothers, Richard is crowned King of England and immediately sets off for the Holy Land. This is the Third Crusade, marked by internecine warfare among the Christians and extraor...

**“Dan Jones is an entertainer, but also a bona fide historian. Seldom does one find serious scholarship so easy to read.” – The Times, Book of the YearA New York Times bestseller, this major new history of the knights Templar is “a fresh, muscular and compelling history of the ultimate military-religious crusading order, combining sensible scholarship with narrative swagger" – Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of JerusalemA faltering war in the midd...

'An author who makes history come gloriously alive' The Times'Meticulous research and strong storytelling' Woman & Home'A sumptuous ride' Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph**********************Eleanor of AquitaineA loving mother. A betrayed wife. A queen beyond compare.Eleanor of Aquitaine's story is lege...

The first in an unforgettable historical saga from the New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Briar Club.“So gripping, your hands are glued to the book, and so vivid it burns itself into your mind’s eye and stays with you long after you turn the final page.”—Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times bestselling authorFirst-century Rome: One young woman will hold the fate of an empire i...

Anne O’Brien’s new novel, Queen of the North, is available to pre-order nowEngland’s Forgotten Queens‘Anne O’Brien has joined the exclusive club of excellent historical novelists.’ - Sunday ExpressENGLAND'S MOST RUTHLESS QUEEN.July, 1137. In the baking sunshine of Bordeaux, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, eagerly awaits her first meeting with the prince who will become her husband.But Louis Capet is no fit ma...

The story of the rise and fall of the powerful and mysterious Knights of the Temple: the Third Crusade under Richard the Lionheart.It is sixty years since the secret Brotherhood of Sion, founders of the Knights Templar, uncovered the treasure vouchsafed them beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Now the ambitious and ruthless Plantagenet King Richard the Lionheart leads the Third Crusade against Saladin, and both the honour of the Templars and the mission of the Brotherhood are at...