The church was gray against a paler gray sky, the bell tower dark against the darker clouds. TIDELANDS, SUSSEX, MIDSUMMER EVE, JUNE 1648

“Fans of Gregory’s works and of historicals in general will delight in this page-turning tale” ( Library Journal, starred review) that is “superb… A searing portrait of a woman that resonates across the ages” ( People). “This is Gregory par excellence” ( Kirkus Reviews). This is the time of witch-mania, and if the villagers discover the truth, they could take matters into their own hands. They have always whispered about the sinister power of Alinor’s beauty, but the secrets they don’t know about her and James are far more damning. Alinor’s suspicious neighbors are watching each other for any sign that someone might be disloyal to the new parliament, and Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her as a woman who doesn’t follow the rules. She shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marshy landscape of the Tidelands, not knowing she is leading a spy and an enemy into her life.Įngland is in the grip of a bloody civil war that reaches into the most remote parts of the kingdom. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run.

Until she can, she is neither maiden nor wife nor widow, living in a perilous limbo. On Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter the ghost of her missing husband and thus confirm his death. This New York Times bestseller from “one of the great storytellers of our time” ( San Francisco Book Review) turns from the glamour of the royal courts to tell the story of an ordinary woman, Alinor, living in a dangerous time for a woman to be different.

Tidelands by philippa gregory