However, after a bit, I was ready to move on from her tried and true political, royal scheming stories that were starting to feel a bit stale to me. I read a good number of Gregory’s works over the years, and enjoyed many them. But I whizzed through “The Other Boleyn Girl” and was hooked on a new genre from there on out. With a few exceptions, up to that point I read fantasy/sci-fi and really that was it. Review: Philippa Gregory was probably one of the authors I associate most strongly with my first experiences reading historical fiction as a teenager. 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. Where Did I Get this Book: e-ARC from the publisherīook Description: England 1648.

Publication Info: Simon & Schuster, August 2019

Tidelands book review