The Barbary Coast, 1621. A mysterious vessel floats silently on the water. It is known only as the Ghost Ship. For months it has hunted pirates to liberate those enslaved by corsairs, manned by a courageous crew of mariners from Italy and France, Holland and the Canary Islands. But the bravest among them are not who they seem. The stakes could not be higher. If arrested, they will be hanged for their crimes. Can they survive the journey and escape...

This dazzling, original and hugely engaging book tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. To many foreigner observers, 17th-century England was 'Devil-Land': a country riven by political faction, religious difference, financial ruin and royal collapse. As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and VI of Scotland and Charles I, were seen...

1620s, Lancashire. Away from the village lies a small hamlet, abandoned since the Plague, where only one family dwell amongst its ruins. Young Sarah Haworth, her mother, brother and little sister Annie are a family of outcasts by day and the recipients of visitors by night. They are cunning folk, the villagers will always need them, quick with a healing balm or more, should your needs require. They can keep secrets too, because no one would believe...

On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardo is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardo wiped out in an instant. Now the women must fend for themselves. Eighteen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilised world, Absalom Cornet...

The Lady knows the stories: that her eyes induce madness in men. The Lady knows she will be wed to the Scottish brute, who does not leave his warrior ways behind when he comes to the marriage bed. The Lady knows his hostile, suspicious court will be a game of survival, requiring all of her wiles and hidden witchcraft to survive. But the Lady does not know her husband has occult secrets of his own. She does not know that prophecy girds him like armour....

London 1671. The damage caused by the Great Fire still overshadows the capital. When a man's brutally disfigured body is discovered in the ruins of an ancient almshouse, architect Cat Hakesby is ordered to stop restoration work. It is obvious he has been murdered, and Whitehall secretary James Marwood is ordered to investigate. It's possible the victim could be one of two local men who have vanished - the first, a feckless French tutor connected to...

Hampton Court has housed centuries of power, royals and politicians pacing its halls, each era taking its turn to shape the palace and the broader confluence of politics. Here, the popular and 'scrupulous historian' Gareth Russell presents five hundred years of British history as seen through its exquisite doorways.

The second volume in an acclaimed biography of Oliver Cromwell, from the capture of Charles I to the expulsion of the Long Parliament.

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding...

Beatrice has been lied to her whole life. Beatrice Barbary has been raised to believe that while education will set her mind free, there are some questions better left unanswered. Her life is in disarray. But when her father, one of the most powerful men in Bern, is brutally murdered in their own home, she is left reeling, unprotected and vulnerable. Her future uncertain. Plunging head first into the mysteries surrounding her father and her own upbringing,...