When you’re immersed in Gregory’s novel, it feels depressingly unsurprising that according to the latest data we’re still looking at a 202-year wait for the gender pay gap to close. While I'm only fifty percent through devouring the Plantagenet and Tudor series (15-book collection), I was awarded the second book in this series via NetGalley, so I had to order the debut before jumping into the next one.

It’s also a world where if you were a man who knew things about medicinal plants, you were a respected apothecary, and if you were a woman, you were at best a helpful neighbour who might get the odd turnip in thanks. Tidelands is the first book in a new series written by Philippa Gregory, an author whose work I have read in the past. It’s a world where children drank ale for breakfast, the Sussex coast was unclaimed marshland and teenaged girls bent their backs gathering in the harvest of a pre-mechanical age. Gregory’s new novel Tidelands, the first in a series, swaps the royal courts for the equally treacherous terrain of a rural England riven by civil war and eaten away from the inside by poverty, inequality and misogyny.Īs with all good historical fiction, the novel offers that uncanny combination of distancing detail and themes that feel only too close to us today. Because this is the deeply superstitious England of 1648, knowing herbs and being a woman is a dangerous combination. She has a son and a daughter and her bullying husband has left her.

She’s extraordinarily beautiful (of course). Midsummer's Eve, 1648, England is in the grip of a civil war. The latest heroine from historical fiction powerhouse Philippa Gregory is the lowly Alinor Reekie, a creation who scrapes a living as a midwife and herbalist. Typical Gregory, meticulously researched setting, lots of truth in the detail and flights of ridiculous fancy to drive the story along. The 1 New York Times bestselling author and 'one of the great storytellers of our time' (San Francisco Book Review) turns from the glamour of the royal courts to tell the story of an ordinary woman, Alinor, who cannot bear to conform to the life that lies before her.

Tidelands book review