Our popular annual list of books to look out for during the year is back for 2022, with history, biography and historical fiction. Here are books to read from HWA authors covering eras from Ancient Rome to the 1980s and sweeping across continents from China to Russia and India, the USA to Australia and the […]
Christmas reading 2021 – the best historical books
We asked eight authors to each recommend a historical book they’d love to receive for Christmas 2021, and one they would give as a Christmas gift. They include many of the best books published this year. We hope these suggestions inspire you, whether you’re looking for ideas for presents or planning to curl up in […]
Destiny’s Tide by JD Davies
Jack Stannard has spent his whole life at sea, enduring savage beatings from his father and the furious aggression of whip-cracking storms. But a more cruel and dangerous foe is on the horizon. When Henry VIII dissolves the monasteries and wages war against France and Scotland simultaneously, Jack must take up his family destiny at […]
Queen Katharine’s restless bones
Alison Weir returns to Historia to tell the strange – and sometimes gruesome – story of what happened to the body of ‘Sixth Wife’ Queen Katharine Parr after it was buried
Henry VII and the Tudor Pretenders by Nathen Amin
On 22 August, 1485, Henry Tudor emerged from the Battle of Bosworth victorious. His disparate army vanquished the forces of Richard III and, according to Shakespeare over a century later, brought ‘smooth-faced peace, with smiling aplenty and fair prosperous days’ back to England. Yet all was not well early in the Tudor reign. Despite later […]
A Book of Secrets by Kate Morrison
This is the story of a woman named Susan Charlewood living in Elizabethan England. Born in what is now Ghana, Susan is enslaved by the Portuguese but later rescued by British sailors, who bring her to England. Once in England, she is raised and educated in an English Catholic household. When Susan comes of age, […]
Walter Raleigh: stripping away the cloak of myth
How does a fiction writer tackle the well-known myths attached to historical figures? Especially when the protagonist was an expert in self-promotion, and the other person involved was Gloriana herself, Queen Elizabeth of England? Author RN Morris found an ingenious answer, as he tells Historia. The one thing everyone knows about Walter Raleigh is that […]
Did Henry VIII really want Katheryn Howard to be executed?
Was Katheryn Howard’s execution avoidable? It may be that in death, as in much of her life, she was a pawn manipulated by some of the most powerful men in England. As historian and novelist Alison Weir tells Historia, evidence suggests that it was Henry VIII’s advisors, rather than the grief-stricken King himself, who wanted […]