A New Lease on Freedom

Thomas and Grace Davenport are not looking for a rebellion. They are looking for their friend Lady Merriman, who has vanished. But the Duke of Monmouth has come ashore at Lyme with a small force and a cry of for liberty and religion, and the West Country is filling with farm boys carrying scythes towards a battle they cannot win.

Grace, meanwhile, has caught the eye of the heir to the Earldom of Sherborne — and in 1685 a Catholic nobleman cannot marry a Puritan girl. The match is doomed before it begins. So is Monmouth. His following melts away as he wanders the West Country, and what follows is not a glorious uprising but a long, sickening reckoning: battle, captivity, betrayal, and the slow walk home through a county that has been made an example of.

This is the novel that opens The Dorset Chronicles — the story of one family living through the decade in which England decided what kind of country it was going to be.

What you're getting into

• Meticulously researched seventeenth-century England, worn lightly
• The Monmouth Rebellion and its brutal aftermath, seen from the ground
• A love story that the century itself is trying to prevent
• For readers of Ken Follett, C. J. Sansom and Bernard Cornwell

Book details

• Series: The Dorset Chronicles, Book One
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 978-1-916071-92-6
• Publisher: Newmore Publishing

Posted directly from Dorset. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.