Matrix

In the ninth century, a canon’s daughter hides her sex, takes her dead brother’s name, and rises from a Fulda monastery to Rome as scholar, healer, and—according to the legend—pope. Donna Woolfolk Cross’s international bestseller is medieval biographical historical fiction of learning, disguise, and a woman the church spent a thousand years denying.

A Highland glen’s stories across centuries of saints, strangers, and secrets (Walter Scott Prize 2022).

A Franciscan friar investigates murders in a labyrinthine abbey where books are power.

Lucrezia de’ Medici is married at fifteen to the Duke of Ferrara, then isolated in a court where a duchess can be painted, praised, and quietly discarded. O’Farrell turns a famous rumor—that Lucrezia was murdered—into close, tense biographical historical fiction of Renaissance Italy.

A painter’s life in Yuan-dynasty China—landscape, politics, and the “ten thousand things” (Walter Scott Prize 2015).

Thomas Cromwell rises through Tudor England’s deadly court, told in close, modern-feeling prose.