philippa gregory tidelands books in order

The civil war has erupted, sending the King in uproar, and the parliament in chaos. Opening in the area of Sussex in 1648, Tidelands immediately settles the reader in the escalating situation faced by the citizens of Tidelands and beyond. The English civil war plays out in the background as the heroine of this tale, Alinor, struggles to survive in a world that that doesn’t understand her.

It is a story of civil war, love, superstition, oppression, sacrifice, secrets and ambition. Tidelands represents the first book in the Fairmile series.

So Tidelands, Gregory’s latest release, was born. The main character, Alinor, is entirely fictional but representative of the working women of her time: excluded from power, from wealth and education, but nonetheless making lives for themselves as best they can.’Ī few years back Philippa Gregory decided that she wanted to pen a historical fiction series that traced an ordinary family, consisting of a lesser known woman, across many generations. ‘This is a big ambition, and it is going to be, I hope, a big series, starting with this novel of an obscure and isolated area of England during the English Civil War. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.Īlinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. A dangerous time for a woman to be different.

Philippa gregory tidelands books in order