The ​White Queen (The Cousins' War 2.) (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels 2.)

The first in historical novelist Philippa Gregory's latest series The Cousins' War, The White Queen plunges the reader into the late medieval England of the Wars of the Roses. It tells the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the beautiful, ambitious wife of Yorkist king Edward and mother of the two princes whose deaths in the Tower of London have never really been explained. This is historical fiction as pure entertainment and none the worse for it: Gregory draws heavily on Woodville's reputation as a witch and the family myth that she cast an enchantment over Edward.

Despite all the hocus-pocus, though, Gregory also keeps her reader glued with well-researched accounts of courtly intrigue and the sense that in this period, suspicion and brutal death were everywhere. There are tacky moments, such as when Elizabeth foresees Richard, who becomes the ill-fated King Richard III, dying in accordance with the lines in Shakespeare's play but this is, nonetheless, rollicking, page-turning stuff.