the acclaimed Weir offers well-researched surprise after surprise about the sensual, rather avaricious but eminently admirable Isabella.' - USA Today Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley ' The finest historian of English monarchical succession writing now is Alison Weir.

a highly readable tour de force that brings Queen Isabella vividly to life.' - The Washington Post Book World ' Insightful. Praise for Alison Weir Queen Isabella ' Compelling, gripping and believable. Weir manages her heroine's voice brilliantly, respecting the past's distance while conjuring a dignified and fiercely modern spirit.' London Daily Mail From the Hardcover edition. historical fiction game.' The Independent 'Alison Weir is one of our greatest popular historians. Weir shows skill at plotting and maintaining tension, and she is clearly going to be a major player in the. Innocent Traitor paints a complete and compelling portrait of this captivating young woman, a faithful servant of God whose short reign and brief life would make her a legend. Readers venture inside royal drawing rooms and bedchambers to witness the power-grabbing that swirls around Lady Jane Grey from the day of her birth to her unbearably poignant death. Along with Lady Jane Grey, Weir vividly renders her devious parents her much-loved nanny the benevolent Queen Katherine Parr Jane's ambitious cousins the Catholic 'Bloody' Mary, who will stop at nothing to seize the throâ‰ and the protestant and future queen Elizabeth. Alison Weir uses her unmatched skills as a historian to enliven the many dynamic characters of this majestic drama. And though she has no ambitions to rule, preferring to immerse herself in books and religious studies, she is forced to accept the crown, and by so doing sets off a firestorm of intrigue, betrayal, and tragedy. Unabashedly honest and exceptionally intelligent, Jane possesses a sound strength of character beyond her years that equips her to weather the vicious storm.

With the premature passing of Jane's adolescent cousin, and Henry's successor, King Edward VI, comes a struggle for supremacy fueled by political machinations and lethal religious fervor. The child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother, for whom she is merely a pawn in a dynastic game with the highest stakes, Jane Grey was born during the harrowingly turbulent period between Anne Boleyn's beheading and the demise of Jane's infamous great-uncle, King Henry VIII. It is the story of Lady Jane Grey'the Nine Days' Queen'a fifteen-year-old girl who unwittingly finds herself at the center of the religious and civil unrest that nearly toppled the fabled House of Tudor during the sixteenth century. Historical expertise marries page-turning fiction in Alison Weir's enthralling debut novel, breathing new life into one of the most significant and tumultuous periods of the English monarchy. I am to die when I have hardly begun to live.

Eleanor of aquitaine by alison weir