Showing results for "Alison Roberts" in Historical Fiction

At just 19, Katheryn Howard is quick to trust and fall in love. She comes to court. She sings, she dances. She captures the heart of the King. Henry declares she is his rose without a thorn. But Katheryn has a past of which he knows nothing. It comes back increasingly to haunt her. For those who share her secrets are waiting in the shadows, whispering words of love...and blackmail.

Over the years of his reign, six different women took their place beside King Henry VIII of England as his wife and queen. But the real stories of the six Tudor queens belong to those who lived among them. Played out in glittering palaces and whispering courts, these are tales of the people who loved and served these women, and those who lied and betrayed them.

1525. As Anne Boleyn's star rises at Henry VIII's court, Jane Parker's marriage to Anne's brother, George, brings her status and influence. But theirs is not a happy union and results in a bitter and bloody end. 1540. When Katheryn Howard, a young cousin of the Boleyns, becomes the King's fifth bride, Jane's past allegiance to the crown secures her senior rank in the new queen's household.

From the echo of the first line ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ to the final ‘It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done’, Dickens’ classic novel of the French revolution tells a story of the redemptive powers of love in the face of cruelty, violence and neglect.

Brought up in the magnificent castles of Scotland under the storm of her parent's turbulent marriage, Margaret Douglas is well-acquainted with the changing whims of those who hold power. And when her father is exiled by King James V, Margaret is sent to England to seek refuge with her uncle King Henry VIII. Margaret is an asset to Henry, who plans to use her eligible marriage status for his own advantage.

The daughter of a peasant, Matilda goes to work at the Lain castle, away from her parents for the first time in her life, her mother’s admonishments to stay away from the men of the castle still ringing in her ears. With barely enough time to put her things away, she meets the son of the family, who makes it clear he is very interested in her. Afraid to trust him, she follows his commands and finds herself engaged to him within the week. Robert Lain has always known that he would someday meet the woman who was just right for him and together they would raise seven sons.

Four hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, the lives of Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas assume their true dimensions in this far-ranging saga of the beginnings of the British Empire. The English came to the New World to found a utopia. Instead they founded a slave state. The only English voice of reason and the first true American hero became an outcast - and then forgotten.

The Leaves of Fate is the third and final volume of the epic fictional chronicle, In the Land of Whispers. Here we find the hero of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, forced to return to England, never to set foot again in the colony. Beyond his compelling memories of life in Jamestown, with its famine, disease, and discord, lies the sordid history of the rapacious greed of desperate colonists and wealthy London financiers who develop tobacco as a cash crop in lieu of food.

Superbly narrated by British actor Nigel Gore, The Dragons of the Storm follows directly on from where The Weight of Smoke left off. Captain John Smith has been stabbed by a stingray and falls deathly ill. The old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, doctors his wound, and to ease Smith’s suffering tells of the daring circumnavigation of the world by Francis Drake, 1577-1580. A masterful interweaving of all the elements that contributed to the birth of the British Empire.