Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5337 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Synopsis
This is the reissue of Philippa Gregory's disturbing novel of passion and betrayal in Tudor, England. This is a haunting story of a woman's desire in a time of turbulence. Alys joins the nunnery to escape hardship and poverty but finds herself thrown back into the outside world when Henry VIII's wreckers destroy her sanctuary. With nothing to support her but her looks, her magic and her own instinctive cunning, Alys has to tread a perilous path between the faith of her childhood and her own female power. When she falls in love with Hugo, the feudal lord and another woman's husband, she dips into witchcraft to defeat her rival and to win her lover, but finds - as her cynical old foster-mother had advised - that magic makes a poor servant but a dominant master. Since heresy against the new church means the stake, and witchcraft the rope, Alys's danger is mortal. A woman's powers are no longer safe to use!

Customer Reviews

Not worth the time.
My Mum was given this book as a gift a couple of years ago and now after we have both read it we agreed that if this had been the first book by Philippa Gregory we had come across we would not have bothered reading any more. The central characters we all unlikeable - though Lord Hugh at least seemed to be a fairly reliable depiction of a landed lord at the time. The blurb on the back of the book no way gives an accurate idea of what you can expect inside the covers. I found the wax dolls creepy and something I was uncomfortable reading. The only reason this book has been given one star is that I am unable to give it less.

Brilliant - Better than I had thought it would be
I was worried to read this, as I have read all of the Tudor Historical Fiction books by Philippa Gregory and absolutely loved them - I didn't want to find a book that wasn't as good. The beginning almost fulfilled my worry, but then I soon got to the point where I was thinking about reading the next chapter while working. It was really very good. I do agree that the 2 main characters, Alys and Hugo are as bad as each other, but at the same time you still want to know. I couldn't get over the ending; abrupt, but brilliant, it left me wanting more.

Now that I've read this one I can safely say I am going to read every single Philippa Gregory book I find.

Anachronistic rubbish
I find Philippa Gregory's pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant bias in her other books rather irritating anyway, but this goes totally over the top. The idea of persecuting Catholics as heretics for their beliefs is anachronistic at this time; when it happened, it was much more likely to happen under Edward VI or Elizabeth than under Henry VIII, who remained a Catholic to the end.

If you want good historical novels set in this period, go to Margaret Irwin who made her characters people of their time much more convincingly than PG does.