If You Love Philippa Gregory, Here Is Where to Come Next

Medieval Knight

I came to English history through Philippa Gregory. Most of us did. The White Queen was the book that opened the door to the Wars of the Roses for me. After that I went looking for everything I could find on the period, and especially on Warwick. The chronicles, the academic histories, the letters that survived. Once you start chasing Warwick, you do not stop.

If you know that feeling, we are the same kind of reader.

Gregory's gift is the women who were there. Elizabeth Woodville marrying Edward IV. Margaret Beaufort choosing her son over every other loyalty. Jacquetta of Luxembourg refusing to stay quiet. The wives, the queens, the mothers whose names history records but whose interior lives the chronicles never bothered with.

I write in that same line. My Lochlainn series follows Alys of Lochlainn through the Wars of the Roses, from the prequel Shamrock through White Rose, Red Rose, and Fleur de Lys. Hampton, the man at the centre of that series, is inspired by Warwick. He had to be. I had wanted to write Warwick for years, and Hampton was the closest I could get without committing to the man himself.

He was not enough. Warwick deserved the full five books I had been holding back from giving him.

That is the Blood of the Bear series, and The Kingmaker's Spy is book one. Where Gregory gives you the kings and the queens, I give you the man standing just behind the throne. Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick. The man history calls a schemer, when the truth is more complicated. Divided loyalties. Blood on his hands. A conscience underneath all of it. And a woman in his shadow who history hardly recorded, because she hid too well.

If you have ever finished a Philippa Gregory novel wanting more spice, more morally grey, and more of what the chronicles never wrote down, this is the book.

Gregory opens the door to the fifteenth century. I try to keep it open once you are inside.

If you fancy going deeper, my monthly letter goes out from my writing desk. It is where I share what I have been reading in the archives, which morally complicated man is keeping me up at night, and what the chronicles taught me this week. The door is open.

The Kingmaker's Spy Cover