SOON TO BE THE TV SERIES 'THE SERPENT QUEEN', STARRING SAMANTHA MORTON
The bestselling revisionist biography of one of the great women of the 16th century
Orphaned in infancy, Catherine de Medici was the sole legitimate heiress to the Medici family fortune. Married at fourteen to the future Henri II of France, she was constantly humiliated by his influential mistress Diane de Poitiers. When her husband died as a result of a duelling accident in Paris, Catherine was made queen regent during the short reign of her eldest son (married to Mary Queen of Scots and like many of her children he died young). When her second son became king she was the power behind the throne.
She nursed dynastic ambitions, but was continually drawn into political and religious intrigues between Catholics and Protestants that plagued France for much of the later part of her life. It had always been said that she was implicated in the notorious Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, together with the king and her third son who succeeded to the throne in 1574, but was murdered. Her political influence waned, but she survived long enough to ensure the succession of her son-in-law who had married her daughter Margaret.
'Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart' Guardian
'Her boldly coloured portrait rewrites his life with all the brio and elan for which her novels are renowned' The Herald
'Hugely enjoyable' Daily Telegraph
BYRON IN LOVE - the nobility, arrogance and sheer theatre of Byron's life.
Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his gigantic flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal.
Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. He was also a great poet, but as he reminded us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has little to do with the individual life of its creator.
Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life.
'O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious 19th-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose' Sunday Telegraph
'A beguiling blend of sympathy, humour and, of course, her signature lilting style . . . a delightful, though poignant, account' Main on Sunday
'There is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet whose writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure' Independent
A biography of the genius who mapped the world and for ever changed the face of the planet - by a bestselling author.
Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator was the greatest and most ingenious cartographer of them all: it was he who coined the word 'atlas' and solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings.
It is Mercator's Projection that NASA are using today to map Mars. How did Mercator reconcile his religious beliefs with a science that would make Christian maps obsolete? How did a man whose imagination roamed continents endure imprisonment by the Inquisition? Crane brings this great man vividly to life, underlying it with colour illustrations of the maps themselves: maps that brought to a rapt public wonders as remarkable as today's cyber-world.
