The new historical novel from Philippa Gregory, the undisputed queen of historical fiction and the #1 bestselling author of Tidelands and Dark Tides.
The spellbinding Fairmile series continues as Alinor and her family find themselves entangled in palace intrigue, political upheaval, and life-changing secrets in seventeenth-century England.
It is 1685, England is on the brink of a renewed civil war against the Stuart kings and many families are bitterly divided. Ned Ferryman cannot persuade his sister Alinor that he is right to return from America with his Pokanoket servant Rowan to join the rebel army. Instead, Alinor has been coaxed by the manipulative Livia to save the queen from the coming siege. The rewards are life-changing: the family could return to their beloved Tidelands, and Alinor could rule where she was once lower than a servant.
Alinor’s son, Rob, is determined to stay clear of the war, but when he and his nephew set out to free Ned from execution for treason and Rowan from a convict deportation to Barbados, they find themselves enmeshed in the creation of an imposter Prince of Wales – a surrogate baby to the queen.
From the last battle in the desolate Somerset Levels to the hidden caves on the slave island of Barbados, this third volume of an epic story follows a family from one end of the empire to another, to find a new dawn in a world which is opening up before them with greater rewards and dangers than ever before.
No one does palace intrigue quite like Gregory, whether she’s writing about the Tudor or Plantagenet courts, as seen in her earlier works, or the court of James II, as she does here, the stakes are always high and the characters are driven to the edge of love and duty. In this latest instalment in the Fairmile series, the king is without an heir and facing attacking revolutionaries while the women at court scheme about how to hold power. All of this makes for an engrossing page-turner that brings to life a fascinating and tumultuous point in British history.
Above all though, what Gregory truly excels at is writing women back into history. We saw this in her first two Fairmile books with the fiercely independent Alinor and her daughter Alys, and again in Dark Tides with Livia. Readers will be delighted to see Livia return here, scheming her way into the deepest recesses of palace intrigue and bringing Alinor and Alys along for the ride.
Richly imagined and meticulously researched, Dawnlands is another sweeping work of historical fiction from a master of the genre, that will appeal to old and new fans alike.
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