100 books like Aethelflaed

Found at Animal Kitchen Bookshop in Narberth, Wales, which has now, sadly, disappeared.

A bookshop that looked like a pet shop from the outside and was piled high with books in absolutely no order inside. After an hour’s happy trawling, I asked the owner if he had any Ellis Peters.

He fished out a box from under his desk and I took as many as I could carry.

This is my favourite Cadfael medieval murder mystery because of its setting in Gwynedd Wales and the appearance of Cadwaladr, who I was very interested in researching at the time.

Like my Welsh trilogy, The Summer of the Danes is set during ‘The Anarchy’, the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda.

Found at the Festilitt annual secondhand booksale in Parisot, France.

Any Donna Leon book is irresistible to me. I know I will enjoy inhabiting those Venetian streets and cafes with her Inspector Brunetti; dining with his family, including his wife, who is an expert on Henry James; hearing more about his colleagues (good and bad) at the police station.

Like Peters’ Cadfael series or Jane Austen’s novels, Leon works on a little piece of ivory – a constrained world and community that the reader can step into. Once there, with Inspector Brunetti, we must puzzle out another well-crafted mystery that evidences both the cruelties and the kindnesses of the human heart.

Found in the University of Wales Trinity Saint David’s Library in Carmarthen during my MA Creative Writing.

Bogin delivers racy translations of the female troubadour poetry and a substantial essay on their context. This was a serendipitous find for me, as I was writing about an 11th-century woman in southern France at the time, Almodis de La Marche, and it set me off on another bout of research that led to another bout of writing.

Female troubadours figure in several of my novels and a very louche, Welsh bard spy is a key character in my trilogy. He is based on my best friend and muse.

I stumbled on this book in Raven secondhand bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was researching for my 12th-century trilogy, Conquest, and this book is a brilliant critical study of the Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis. The book is wonderfully written and conveys the astonishing beauty of Orderic’s own work.

Orderic, as he writes, ranged far and wide across the Anglo-Norman kingdom in his imagination and then returned to his ‘black-clad life’ as a monk.

Raven and Shakespeare and Co. Bookshop in Paris are amongst my top favourites. I love to visit Shakespeare for its cramped unevenly floored labyrinth and intelligent array of books.

I greatly enjoy a bookshop – these two and Victoria Bookshop in Haverfordwest spring to mind – where the staff is obviously as lovestruck by books as I am.

As with the book on Athelstan above, this is the first of England’s queen, and the first of England’s queens for whom we have a historical record that she underwent consecration, for which a monograph currently exists. While the author does draw on much post-conquest material, if not for this book I know I would never have begun to consider the queens, as well as the kings, as subjects that I could write about. It’s not the thickest of books, but it is very well written, again adopting a chronological approach, and readers will feel as though Queen Elfrida, whose Old English name was Ælfthryth, feels far more understandable, as opposed to being lost behind the seemingly impenetrable wall of 1066 and the Norman Conquest. It perhaps helps, that Queen Elfrida had quite a scandalous reputation☺

This is another biography of the current queen that shows how the monarchy works. It differs from Sarah Bradford’s biography. Pimlott was a historical expert on the labour party during the twentieth century. He brought to his book all the skepticism about the crown that people on the political left traditionally have in Britain. Perhaps surprisingly, then, he comes out admiring Elizabeth II. He sticks much more narrowly than Bradford does to political crises in which the queen had some noted or decisive influence.

This was the first Royal history book I ever read and it hooked me into the world of Queen Victoria and her descendants.

It is a classic, standard biography of Victoria - an excellent overview of her life as a woman in a man’s world, her marriage and her widowhood. Many biographies since have dissected various aspects of Victoria’s life without giving a good general telling of her story. But this is what Elizabeth Longford does - with a writing style that flows and is so so easy to read.

It is “warts and all” -  Victoria was not the easiest of characters, had steaming rows with Albert, was dictatorial as a mother, and a professional widow. I came away feeling as though I knew Victoria.

More importantly, this book made me want to find out more about her family, and royal history in general. It influenced me so much… show more.

The wittiest of royal biographers, James Pope-Hennessy listed the three consuming passions of Queen Mary (1867-1953) as the British Monarchy, Windsor Castle, and collecting dolls’ house furniture. She was also dedicated to the coaching of her granddaughter Elizabeth as a future Queen. The old Queen’s excursions with the "Little Princesses," Elizabeth and Margaret, to London’s art galleries and museums, were the closest the two girls came to serious education. So read this book if you want to understand Elizabeth II as a child. It remains possible to detect Queen Mary’s reserve and occasional severity in the dutiful style of her eldest granddaughter to this day.  

Back to pure history! At one point, I was the founder and publisher—the Head Goose—of Goosebottom Books. Of all the books we published, this title is my favorite. Gretchen Maurer, the author, did a great job of presenting a very complex and nuanced story in a way that makes it human and understandable to young readers, without side-stepping the facts. The book design and illustration are remarkable and evoke the rich Tudor aesthetic. But what I love most about this book is that it presents the antihero to my childhood hero, Elizabeth I of England, and raises the question: just how fair was history? One of these two sisters became known as Bloody Mary, the other as Good Queen Bess. Did they fully deserve those reputations?

I really did not like history when I was at school because other than 1066 (the Norman invasion of Britain) and 1492 (Columbus sailed the ocean blue) I could not remember the dates. I was not interested in the succession of kings or what countries made alliances through marriages. And then I read this book about Edward IV’s reign and the subsequent chaos which resulted in the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. I was hooked. What made it more realistic for me was walking Bosworth Field, the site of the last great battle of that era. Stirring stuff.