The White Queen

In fourteenth-century England, convent-raised Katherine de Roet is married to a harsh knight, then drawn into a decades-long love with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster—through plague, the Peasants’ Revolt, and a Plantagenet court rotting with intrigue. Anya Seton’s novel is medieval biographical historical fiction of the woman whose Beaufort children would shape the English royal line.

Richard, youngest son of York, grows from a loyal brother into the last Plantagenet king: Towton, Barnet, Tewkesbury, the princes in the Tower, and the charge at Bosworth that ends the Wars of the Roses. Sharon Kay Penman’s 1982 novel is medieval historical saga that restores Richard III as soldier, husband, and contested king—England’s most argued-over reign, told at full length.

Mary Boleyn’s perspective on the rise of Anne Boleyn and the dangerous theater of Henry VIII’s court.

Cathedral-building, civil war, and intertwined lives in twelfth-century England.

Tudor historian Tracy Borman tells the Boleyn family's rise and fall from Hever Castle—Anne, Mary, Thomas, and the household watching Henry VIII's court close in.

Llywelyn ab Iorwerth comes back to Gwynedd as a boy to take the north of Wales, and King John later marries his illegitimate daughter Joanna to the prince he cannot hold as a vassal. Sharon Kay Penman’s 1985 novel is medieval saga historical fiction of that marriage across the early thirteenth century—Joanna between her father’s court and her husband’s Wales, and a principality Llywelyn spends his reign trying to keep free.