Description
Set in late fourteenth century England, Vanora Bennett's rich, dramatic new novel presents an England uncannily like our own. The country is in turmoil, The King is in debt to the City, and the old order had broken down - a time of opportunity indeed, for those who can seize the moment.The king's mistress, Alice Perrers, becomes the virtual ruler of the country from his sickbed. Disliked and despised by the Black Prince and his cronies, her strong connections to the merchants make her a natural ally for the king's ambitious second son, John of Gaunt. Together they create a powerful position in the city for one of his henchmen, Geoffrey Chaucer.In this moment of opportunity, Alice throws herself into her new role and the riches that lay before her, but Chaucer, even though her lover and friend, is uneasy over what he can foresee of the conspiracies around them.At the centre of these troubled times and political unrest stands the remarkable figure of a woman who, having escaped the plague which killed her whole family, is certain she is untouchable, and a man who learns that cleverness and ambition may for him sit too uneasily with decency and honesty.
About the Author
I became a journalist almost by accident. Having learned Russian and been hired after university by Reuters (to my own surprise and the slight dismay of traditionally-minded editors who weren’t sure a Guardian-reading blonde female would be tough enough for the job), I was then catapulted into the adrenaline-charged realm of conflict reporting. While on a trainee assignment in Paris, I fell in with the Cambodian émigré community and ended up reporting in Cambodia myself, a decade after the Khmer Rouge regime ended, as well as covering Cambodian peace talks in places as far apart as Indonesia and Paris. That led to a conflict reporting job in Africa, commuting between Angola and Mozambique and writing about death, destruction, diamonds and disease, and later to a posting in a country that stopped being the Soviet Union three months after I arrived. I spent much of the early 1990s in smoky taxis in the Caucasus mountains, covering a series of small post-Soviet conflicts that built up to the war in Chechnya.My fascination with the cultural and religious differences between Russians and the many peoples once ruled by Moscow grew into a book on the Chechen war (Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya). A second, more light-hearted book followed, about post-Soviet Russia’s illegal caviar trade, once I’d got homesick for London and moved back to writer leaders on foreign affairs for The Times. This book was The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar.I now lead a more sedate life in North London with my husband and two small sons, enjoying the reading, research, writing and metropolitan leisure activities that I grew up expecting adult life to involve. I’ve found that writing books is much of a surprise, a pleasure and an adventure of the mind as it was to become a foreign correspondent.As a journalist I’ve written for, among others, The Times and its website, TimesOnline, the Los Angeles Times, Prospect, The Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian Saturday magazine, the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, Eve magazine, The Observer Food Monthlyand The Erotic Review.
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