Phillippa is a master at the everyday, at representing what it might have been like to live during that time. Alinor, her daughter Alys and son Rob and James, the outsider, who rocks his world and theirs. Foreboding and isolating, the arrival of a newcomer brings with it the intrusion of the outside world where King Charles is at war with Parliament.Ī slow burning romance allows us time to get to know our main characters. With echoes of Great Expectations the Tidelands of the title are very much a character in their own right. Having recently read and enjoyed The Familiars by Stacey Halls I thought this would be a great introduction. The Tidelands is a new series, set during a period where life could be dangerous for women who were walking a fine line between healing and what could be seen as witchcraft. I don’t read a lot of historical fiction but even I am familiar with Philippa Gregory, despite never having read her work before.

Philippa lives with her family on a small farm in Yorkshire and welcomes visitors to her website,.

In 2016, she received the Harrogate Festival Award for Outstanding Contribution to Historical Fiction.

Philippa graduated from the University of Sussex and holds a PhD and Alumna of the Year 2009 at Edinburgh University. Her Cousins’ War novels, reaching their dramatic conclusion with The King’s Curse, were the basis for the highly successful BBC series, The White Queen. Philippa Gregory is the author of many bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl, and is a recognised authority on women’s history. 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.

Tidelands philippa gregory series