Last July, I decided to hand my notice into work to write ‘full-time’. In a fit of panic at my decision, I wrote a book in about 5 weeks. That book was The King’s Mother.
This year, to celebrate my one year anniversary, I decided to celebrate by doing the same thing! (Yes, I know, why give myself more work to do? (I don’t know)).
Anyway, I’ve loved the challenge and it is a bit of a rush to fling yourself headlong into something. So, I’m proud to present Kingmaker – the story of Queen Eadgifu of the Anglo-Saxons. She is not a new ‘character’ for me, but rather one I’m returning to, after her appearance in The First Queen of England.
Queen Eadgifu has been a joy to write, and I’ve loved the challenge of writing one novel that covers the entire lifetime of a person, as normally, I tend to stick with just a decade at most.
I really hope that you, my readers, will find Lady Eadgifu as fascinating as I have, and also, that the middle of the tenth century will feel a little more accessible.
Here’s the blurb;
“This is the tenth century in Anglo-Saxon England between the reigns of Alfred the Great, and Æthelred the Unready.
As England’s first Viking Age grinds to a halt in a war of attrition that will see Jorvik finally added to the kingdom of the English, one woman will witness it all.
Seventeen-year-old Eadgifu knows little about her new husband; he’s old, he only wants to marry her because she’s so wealthy, he already has ten children, and he’s Edward, king of Wessex. He also hopes to claim Mercia as his own.
That he’s the son of King Alfred, the man credited with saving Wessex from the Viking Raiders adds no mystique to him at all.
Many say he’s handsome, but Eadgifu knows they speak of the man twenty years ago. Her mother won’t even allow her to be alone with him before their wedding.
But an old man will not live forever. The mother of his youngest sons can be more powerful than the wife of the king of Wessex, especially in the newly made kingdom of England where king’s lives are short and bloody, and war with the Viking Raiders is never far away.
Lady, wife, queen, mother, king’s mother, grandmother, ally, enemy, amenable and rebellious.
Lost to the mists of time, this is Queen Eadgifu’s story, Kingmaker.”
Kingmaker is released on August 29th 2019 and will be available from Amazon as both an ebook and a paperback.
I am calling Kingmaker, Book 2 in a series of standalone, but interconnected novels I’ve written about The Tenth Century. The Lady of Mercia’s Daughter (Book 1 ) is already available from here and at the moment it is 99p/99c and equivalent in every Amazon territory
M J Porter 