The Sunne in Splendour

Spanning the Wars of the Roses, The Sunne in Splendour follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, from a frightened boy fleeing into exile to his brief, doomed reign as Richard III. Penman reconstructs the dynastic bloodletting between the houses of York and Lancaster, the shifting loyalties, the battles at Barnet and Tewkesbury, and the treacheries that surround the crown. At the center is Richard himself, reimagined not as Shakespeare's twisted villain but as a loyal, honorable man undone by the age he lived in, and his loving marriage to Anne Neville. The novel runs more than nine hundred pages and immerses the reader completely in fifteenth-century England.