In the Afterword Annie Garthwaite tells us how she became interested in history and on the type of history that interested her. She is also a great storyteller, bringing sense and coherence to a very convoluted and complex period. So begins this biographical novel of Cecily Neville which follows her and the fortunes of the House of York for 30 years until the ascendency of her son, Edward IV, in 1461. A thirty-year international business career made me even more interested in women’s relationship with power.

I originally didn’t know much about Cecily Neville, but now I feel like I know every heartache and every victory that she experienced.The main characters, Cecily and Richard, were on the one hand recognisable as modern people , for example that Richard was an administrator who would have preferred to run a manageable company (Ireland) rather than engage in endless “takeover bids“.

P.S I really loved William Oldhall - a minor character but one I loved seeing on the page each time and really felt for when he died. I was alerted to it by my friend Brian Wainwright, a fellow historical novelist and Ricardian and without his recommendation I might have passed it by -- scarred by trying to read (not recently) 2 terrible novels about Cecily Duchess of York. A lot of novels I’ve read about this particular time period – the end of the Hundred Years War, the beginning of the Wars of the Roses – tend to focus mainly on the origins of the Wars of the Roses and deal with the Hundred Years War as something to be gotten through to get to the “good stuff”, even though the failures in France were what undermined Henry VI’s reign and his favourites. The book is packed with historical detail, especially in the latter stages, but as events are always seen through the eyes of Cecily, either witnessed by her directly or via letters from Richard, this helps to lessen the feeling one is sitting through a history lesson.Cecily was a pivotal figure being Duchess of York and mother of two kings ( Edward IV and Richard III and grandmother to a third ( Edward V). York deliberately went out of his way to align himself to Gloucester, and paint himself as Gloucester's political heir, so why on earth they were at loggerheads baffled me. Everyone else I’ve read, tries their hands at medievalising their plot through prose but roots all their other aspects such as characterisation and plot arcs into their times and have failed imo. Overall, I was hoping that as I got further into the book Cecily would start to become a real character but sadly the novel remains like a patchwork of recorded historical events with no insights/imagination as to how Cecily felt. It isn't anti-men, in fact her relationship and alliance with her husband is one of the strongest themes in the book.