The Butcher's Daughter

Description

We are, all of us, princes and peasants, alone in this world. The Butcher's Daughter is the richly atmospheric story of a young woman's struggle to define herself in a world of uncertainty, intrigue and danger in a period of great upheaval during the Tudor era. It is 1535 and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West Country butcher, leaves her family home in disgrace. Banished and forced to abandon her new-born infant, she is meant to live out her days cloistered behind the walls of the Shaftesbury Abbey. But as Agnes grapples with the complex rules and hierarchies of her new life, King Henry VIII has proclaimed himself the new head of the Church. Religious houses are being formally suppressed and the great Abbey is no exception to the purge. Free at last to be the master of her own fate, Agnes descends into a world she knows little about, using her wits and testing her moral convictions against her need to survive by any means necessary...

VICTORIA GLENDINNING is a British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Born in Sheffield and educated at Oxford where she studied modern languages, she later worked for The TLS. She is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was appointed a CBE in 1998, is the twice winner of the Whitbread Biography award and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. A regular contributor of articles and reviews to various UK newspapers and magazines, she is also the author of three widely acclaimed novels: The Grown-Ups, Electricity, and Flight.