Image: Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, and her six daughters, from the Neville Book of Hours. Cecily is wearing a golden gown, with green patterns. ( Source and another) I hope you enjoy getting to know the seven sisters in this series, each of them different and remarkable in their own way. Just like in life, you're bound to identify with a particular sister more than the others, but that's the part of the fun. And some sisters might even surprise you . . . The youngest of the D'Aplièse sisters, Electra, known for her fiery temper, has always been outspoken and a rebel. Now one of the world's most successful supermodels, she is living in New York, away from her sisters, and is struggling to cope with both the death of Pa Salt and the break up of a relationship. Turning further to drugs and alcohol, she then, she receives a mysterious letter from a woman claiming to be her biological grandmother and her life takes an unexpected turn… Judging by the actual technical skill of the writing, it’s awesome. The prose is gorgeous. It does something sound more “modern” than I’d expect a historical novel to but those moments are relatively few. Garthwaite’s writing is evocative and illuminative. But it’s also matched by a tight, tense plot that verges into a political thriller. It’s a compelling, taut read. I took it more slowly than I could have because I wanted to savour the book but I could’ve read this book within a day or two. There are genuinely harrowing, emotional moments – I was moved to tears, I had a pit in my stomach. I took photos of some passages so I could keep rereading them.

Many, many novels have been written about the Wars of the Roses, with the latest tending to focus on the women involved in the wars. Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, Margaret Beaufort, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Jane Shore, Kate Haute, Elizabeth of York, and the indomitable Margaret of Anjou. Annie Garthwaite’s novel Cecily focuses on yet another of these women – Cecily Neville, the wife of Richard, Duke of York and the mother of Edward IV and Richard III.I rarely encounter my name in any context that doesn't refer to me personally. I've never met another Cecily (though I've met a Celia, a Cecilia, and a Cecil). As a child, I never had pens, t-shirts, or bags with my name printed on them. Perhaps that’s why my favourite Beatrix Potter was Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes (which I reviewed here), and later, I was easily won over to Oscar Wilde by The Importance of Being Earnest (which I reviewed here). I’m not named after a famous Cecily from history of fiction, but after my maternal grandmother, who died in a car accident when my father was in his teens. A thirty-year international business career made me even more interested in women’s relationship with power. You can imagine. Let’s just say, I frequently found myself the only woman at the big table. A first time author has had her debut novel CECILY published after a successful launch on Tuesday at Ludlow Castle. I also dealt with grief in 2020 and it did make the pandemic all the more scary and lonely. It still does. Losing someone is very hard, especially when you convinced yourself it would not happen. When you believed it would all be okay and it turns out that it isn't. I wouldn't say I "enjoyed" this connection to her words, but somehow it helps to know you were not and are not alone in those thoughts and feelings.

Cecily Brown hasn’t always found it easy to talk about her art. “There was a time in the early 1990s in England where you basically felt like people at a party would turn away if you said you were a painter,” says the British-born, New York-based artist in her new Contemporary Artist Series monograph. “People would constantly say ‘Oh, why are you a painter?’, and you had to defend it all the time. There was this idea that if you were a painter it was because you had an unquestioning belief in painting’s power, rather than that it just happened to be a medium that you wanted to employ and that you felt you could still use to say something.”BLOODY GREAT. So modern, so political, it could almost be set in Downing Street' KATE SAWYER, author of The Stranding This book was good. Enjoyable and entertaining, a solid 3.5 stars. In short, a very well-researched and gripping account of Cecily's life, but one that I just wanted more from. Scope: When I first started out with this story, I expected the main focus to be on the later period of Cecily's life - when she is the mother of two kings and grandmother of a third. But I was actually pleasantly surprised to find out that Garthwaite had chosen to focus solely on the period in Cecily's life before she was raised so high in the world. Here, we get the story of the end War of the Roses as seen through the eyes of one women who was probably closest to the action - and perhaps a greater part of it than anyone of us will ever know. Where Cecily is fierce and combative, Richard is conciliatory and calm, reluctant to show open defiance. He accepts the lieutenancy of Ireland philosophically, telling Cecily: “Let’s live as your brother does [in the north]. As your father did. Doing good work for the King, far from court, in our own lands.”

Now Pa was gone, we were just a bunch of disparate women who had been thrown together as kids, but were now going our separate ways. I took some breaths and tried to do as all my therapists had told me to, which was to analyse why I'd gotten so angry. And for a change, I thought I knew the reason: Ally had told me that all my sisters were happy – they had found lives with people who loved them…

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Together Cecily and Richard make a formidable team with Cecily becoming more involved in events than would normally be expected of a wife. Not that she isn’t also expected to carry out the duties of a wife – running a large household and bearing children, preferably male heirs or, if not, daughters who can be used to make profitable alliances. The perils of childbirth are vividly depicted and, in fact, Cecily’s involvement in the political manouverings provides a distraction from her grief. ‘It has saved her, these past weeks, to be at the centre of his stratagems, poring over maps, drawing up plans, deciding the appointments of officers; weighing up men’s competence and ambition, where they will serve best and how far they can be trusted.’ Trust turns out to be a rare commodity. Cecily Strong is well known from her time on Saturday Night Live (and now on Schmigadoon!) - she also experienced quite a bit of loss in 2020, her cousin friend Owen but also other people close to her, much less the shutdown of a city and then the world that we all experienced. I will always recommend grief memoirs to people who have experienced grief because the number one thing they accomplish is to help you feel you aren't alone. Cecily wrote this like a diary (unclear if they started that way) so the posts vary in tone and focus, just like life. She has some days where anxiety is the focus and others where she reflects on something happening in the world politically or even in pop culture, but others where she is writing about her cousin, Covid, isolation, etc. This was a time when the sons and daughters of noble houses were married in childhood in pursuit of dynastic alliances, although such marriages may not be consummated until some years later. Indeed, Cecily was only nine years old herself when she was joined in marriage with Richard Plantagenet. England has been fighting France for 100 years. At home, power-hungry men within a corrupt government manipulate a weak king - and name Cecily's husband, York's loyal duke, an enemy. As the king's grasp on sanity weakens, plots to destroy York take root...

It’s not that I’m a big fan of blood and battles. Personally I can do without that sort of thing. No. It’s the women who interest me. How they negotiated their way in the world. How they managed – some of them at least, probably more than you’d think – to wield power and influence at a time when men seemed to hold most of the cards. And how others, simply, didn't. Perfect for a trivia night or a long trip, #TrainTeasers will both test your knowledge of this country`s rail system and enlighten you on the most colourful aspects of its long history. Meet trunk murderers, trainspotters, haters of railways, railway writers, Ministers for Transport good and bad, railway cats, dogs and a railway penguin. This is NOT a book for number-crunching nerds. Many of the answers are guessable by the intelligent reader. It is a quiz, yes, but also a cavalcade of historical incident and colour relating to a system that was the making of modern Britain. This is a beautiful memoir about the author written in a diary about how she made her way through the pandemic and coped with grief after losing her cousin, Owen. Consider these thoughts, on the artistic debt she owes to her novelist mother. “My painting is really close to my mum’s writing. The very visual nature of her writing, its surreal nature, had a big influence on me.” Or this, on the way she wants to engage with viewers. “It sounds like I’m a sadist, but I want that feeling of never quite knowing. The danger is that it ends up being a frustrating game. What I want is to find that moment where you’ve said it, although not completely, but you’ve said enough that you are rewarded for looking.”I knew that my ‘gift' of beauty had helped to bring about the most painful moment of my life, simply because I was too naive at the time to understand the power it wielded. So now, I hid it away, which meant hiding myself.' Solid research underlies the story, and the prominent role the couple played in the history of this period is deftly conveyed. Talk predominates in the first part of the book, but as York mounts direct challenges to Marguerite and the king’s favorites the action increases and the story is told with some wonderful scenes. Cecily’s role in these events seems overplayed (see above, regarding the flight from Ludlow), but perhaps not by much. Marguerite is often portrayed the House of Lancaster’s warrior queen; why couldn’t Cecily have played a similar role for the House of York? Plot: We follow Cecily Neville Duchess of York (and only Cecily Neville Duchess of York - keep this in mind as it’s important later on) from her tween years all the way to her son Edward’s ascension in 1461. Even though I’m familiar with the first phase of TWOTR, I must confess I don’t know it historiographically like I know the York in-fighting period. Therefore, I can’t heavily comment on the inaccuracies or details. Although, at certain points I do feel like the author inserted Cecily in situations where the players were other people and in which she played no part to give her greater agency eg Cardinal Beaufort’s intercession for Jacquetta, the various meetings RoY held with his stewards and war council… etc. The first years of Cecily’s lives are skimmed over and the bulk of the story focuses on her life between the time of Richard Duke of York (RoY)‘s Norman governorship and the aftermath of Towton. While I would have preferred to have seen more of the childhood Cecily shared with RoY in Westmoreland’s home - since I would have liked to see some more ‘young Cecily’ instead of the old woman we are used to - I am happy to have once again dipped my toes into the decades prior to when York vs Lancaster became (in any way) a thing. This way I got to read a narrative more geared towards assessing the individuals one by one, as the author was prevent from falling into the red vs white rose dichotomy plot device, which I have seen swallow up too many of the weaker authors who throw subtlety out of the window because of the dramatic promise a York vs Lancaster story offers. The book tells the story of Cecily Neville, the woman who married Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and bore him twelve children, many of whom sadly died in infancy. In doing so, Annie Garthwaite joins other writers of historical fiction such as Philippa Gregory and Anne O’Brian who have chronicled this period of history. Cecily is a brilliant character. She's pragmatic, ruthless, loving, brave, and intelligent. The author did a great job of taking some aspects of her character that would be fairly unusual these days (her fervent religious beliefs) and make them seem authentic, and also take concepts that we're more familiar with talking about now (like post natal depression) and explore them in a historical context. Many of the other characters felt well rounded as well.