A Plague on Mr Pepys

Deb Willet takes a position as companion to Elisabeth Pepys, Samuel's wife. Deb believes it will give her the respectability she craves, but it proves far more complicated than she could ever have imagined. Samuel Pepys' influence in Restoration London means that the Dutch are keen to get their hands on his secrets, even if that means murder. Deb is soon caught up in a dangerous game, while at the same time trying to counter Mr Pepys' lust for her....

As she helps to nurse the dying Queen Elizabeth, Frances Gorges longs for the fields and ancient woods of her parents' Hampshire estate, where she has learned to use the flowers and herbs to become a much-loved healer. Frances is happy to stay in her beloved countryside when the new King arrives from Scotland, bringing change, fear and suspicion. His court may be shockingly decadent, but James' religion is Puritan, intolerant of all the old ways.

Rhoda Middleton suspects her husband Peter is having an affair. But when Rhoda tracks the mysterious woman down, she finds she is not his lover after all, but the wife of his wartime best friend, Archie Foster. There is only one problem - Rhoda has never even heard of Archie Foster.

LONDON, 1590. Queen Elizabeth I's control over her kingdom is wavering. Amidst a tumultuous backdrop of Spanish plotters, Catholic heretics and foreign wars threatening the country's fragile stability, the body of a small boy is found in the City of London, with strange marks that no one can explain. When idealistic physician Nicholas Shelby finds another body displaying the same marks only days later, he becomes convinced that a killer is at work, preying on the weak and destitute of London.  

It's 1194, and Sir Faucon de Ramis, the shire's newly appointed keeper of the pleas, must do his duty and make an official declaration of the cause of a miller's death. Saddled with a clerk who names Faucon his "penance", the shire's first crowner must thread the tangled relationships between the sheriff, the village of Priors Holston, and the priory that once ruled it. As a simple task takes a turn to the political, what seems obvious isn't, and what appears safe turns out to be more dangerous than he could imagine. 

Carolyn Kirby's stunning debut takes the listener on a heart-breaking journey through Victorian Birmingham and questions where we first learn violence: from our scars or from our hearts. Birmingham, 1885. Born in a gaol and raised in a workhouse, Cora Burns has always struggled to control the violence inside her. Haunted by memories of a terrible crime, she seeks a new life working as a servant in the house of scientist Thomas Jerwood. Here, Cora befriends a young girl, Violet, who seems to be the subject of a living experiment. But is Jerwood also secretly studying Cora?  

Fresh from the Battle of Hastings, William of Normandy has returned home in triumph, accompanied by the English nobles he cannot trust to be left behind. But Waltheof of Huntingdon is not thinking of rebellion; from the moment he sees Judith, daughter of the king's formidable sister, he knows he has found his future wife. The attraction is mutual, but in mediaeval Europe marriage has little to do with love. When William refuses to let the couple wed, Waltheof joins an uprising against him.

When Esther Thorel, the wife of a Huguenot silk weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks she is doing God's will. Sara is not convinced being a maid is better than being a whore, but the chance to escape her grasping madam is too good to refuse. Inside the Thorels' tall house in Spitalfields, where the strange cadence of the looms fills the attic, the two women forge an uneasy relationship. 

London, September 1666. The Great Fire rages through the city, consuming everything in its path. Even the impregnable cathedral of St. Paul's is engulfed in flames and reduced to ruins. Among the crowds watching its destruction is James Marwood, son of a disgraced printer and reluctant government informer. In the aftermath of the fire, a semi-mummified body is discovered in the ashes of St. Paul's, in a tomb that should have been empty. The man's body has been mutilated, and his thumbs have been tied behind his back.

It is 1535, and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West Country butcher, is banished from her family home. Forced to abandon her newborn child, she is meant to live out her days cloistered behind the walls of Shaftesbury Abbey. But King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the church. Religious houses are being suppressed, and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Free to be the master of her own fate, Agnes descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary....

London, 1656: Captain Seeker is back in the city, on the trail of an assassin preparing to strike at the heart of Oliver Cromwell's Republic. The Commonwealth is balanced on a knife edge. Royalists and disillusioned former Parliamentarians have united against Oliver Cromwell, now a king in all but name. Three conspirators, representing these factions, plan to assassinate the Lord Protector, paving the way back to the throne for Charles Stuart once and for all. 

Born on the night of a bad-luck comet, Ursula Flight has a difficult destiny written in the stars. Growing up with her family in the country, she is educated by a forward-thinking father who enables her to discover a love of reading, writing and astrology. Ursula dreams of becoming a famous playwright but is devastated to learn she must instead fulfil her family's expectations and marry. Trapped and lost, Ursula plots her escape - but her freedom will come at a price.

No matter how hard life is, humanity has the power to make it bearable -- or worse. Parliament of Rooks, the new historical paranormal novel in the award-winning Yorkshire Ghosts series, contrasts the beautiful, inspiring village of Haworth today with the slum -- or rookery -- it was during the industrial revolution: rife with disease, heartache, poverty, and child slavery in the mills. In 2017, life expectancy in the UK is 81.

Porlock Weir, Exmoor, 1361. Thirteen years after the Great Pestilence, plague strikes England for the second time. Sara, a packhorse man's wife, remembers the horror all too well and fears for the safety of her children. Only a dark-haired stranger offers help but at a price that no one will pay.

The lives of Henry VIII's queens make for dramatic stories, and Alison Weir writes a series of novels that offer insights into the real lives of the six wives based on extensive research and new theories. In all the romancing, has anyone regarded the evidence that Anne Boleyn did not love Henry VIII? Or that Prince Arthur, Katherine of Aragon's first husband, who is said to have loved her, in fact cared so little for her that he willed his personal effects to his sister?