Lamentation

Description

The eagerly anticipated new Shardlake novel, already a #1 international bestseller.
     Summer, 1546. King Henry VIII is slowly, painfully dying. His Protestant and Catholic councillors are engaged in a final and decisive power struggle; whoever wins will control the government of Henry’s successor, eight-year-old Prince Edward. As heretics are hunted across London, and the radical Protestant Anne Askew is burned at the stake, the Catholic party focus their attack on Henry’s sixth wife, Matthew Shardlake’s old mentor, Queen Catherine Parr. Shardlake, still haunted by events aboard the warship Mary Rose the year before, is working on the Cotterstoke Will case, a savage dispute between rival siblings. Then, unexpectedly, he is summoned to Whitehall Palace and asked for help by his old patron, the now beleaguered and desperate Queen. For Catherine Parr has a secret. She has written a confessional book, Lamentation of a Sinner, so radically Protestant that if it came to the King’s attention it could bring both her and her sympathizers crashing down. But, although the book was kept secret and hidden inside a locked chest in the Queen’s private chamber, it has–inexplicably–vanished. Only one page has been found, clutched in the hand of a murdered London printer. Shardlake’s investigations take him on a trail that begins among the backstreet printshops of London but leads him and Jack Barak into the dark and labyrinthine world of the politics of the royal court; a world he had sworn never to enter again. Loyalty to the Queen will drive him into a swirl of intrigue inside Whitehall Palace, where Catholic enemies and Protestant friends can be equally dangerous, and the political opportunists, who will follow the wind wherever it blows, more dangerous than either.    • Hilary Mantel’s books about Thomas Cromwell continue to be popular.
Praise for Lamentation:
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “C.J. Sansom has created a convincingly realistic Tudor detective in Matthew Shardlake. He lives and breathes in an utterly convincing world, drawing the reader into the darker corners of history.” –Philippa Gregory, quoted in The Guardian “Engrossing…. Even when judged by the high standards of the earlier Shardlake novels, this one stands out…. With the Shardlake series, and with this volume in particular, Sansom has surely established himself as one of the best novelists around.” –Alan Judd, The Spectator

C. J. SANSOM was educated at Birmingham University, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. Sansom is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Shardlake series, as well as Winter in Madrid and Dominion. He lives in Sussex.

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