Showing results for "the-king’s-witches" in Historical Fiction

In The King's Witches, the second novel from Kate Foster, the lives of three very different women in sixteenth-century Britain become intertwined as the first rumours of witchcraft grip the country.

As she helps to nurse the dying Queen Elizabeth, Frances Gorges longs for the fields and ancient woods of her parents' Hampshire estate, where she has learned to use the flowers and herbs to become a much-loved healer. Frances is happy to stay in her beloved countryside when the new King arrives from Scotland, bringing change, fear and suspicion. His court may be shockingly decadent, but James' religion is Puritan, intolerant of all the old ways.

In this mighty follow-up to his number one best seller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Man Booker winner Marlon James once again draws on a rich tradition of African mythology, fantasy and history to imagine a mythic world, a lost child, a 177-year-old witch, a deadly regal chancellor and a mystery with many answers.... Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman - the witch Sogolon - who bows to no man, this is an unforgettable exploration of power, personality and the places where they overlap, set in a world at once ancient and startlingly modern.

As Christmas looms, the villagers come under the spell of the Holly King, a demigod bent on destroying Woodville. Faye, Bertie and the witches are determined to stop him, but first they must confront terrible truths that threaten to tear them apart.

Frances Gorges seems destined to be happy at last. King James has apparently lost his appetite for hunting witches, so the medical skills and herbal knowledge that saw Frances accused of witchcraft no longer seem to hang over her like a death sentence. The king would rather be hunting stag and boar - and Frances' beloved husband, Thomas, is firmly established in the royal household as the Master of Buckhounds. Their family is growing and their estates are secure. But life at court is never without intrigue, jealousy and danger for long, and a new arrival turns the world upside down.

But if her torturers at the court of King James knew of her love for Tom Wintour, one of the executed members of the gunpowder plot, it would mean certain death. Pregnant with Tom's child, hiding under the reluctant protection of her spiteful and ambitious brother, Frances lives in fear - until she is offered the chance to make a respectable - if loveless - marriage and return to court. She will not be expected to sleep with her husband. The only price she must pay for safety is to give up the cause for which her lover died.

The year is 1397 and Linnea just lost everything. Exactly everything! The accusations of witchcraft force her to flee into the woods even though nothing scares her more than the forest. She has heard about everything that exists there. Sirens, ghosts and the Moss family—the most feared witch family of them all. The Mosses—the ones who trick people into their dark abodes. Real witches, not innocent peasant women.