Tidelands

Midsummer's Eve, 1648, and Alinor waits in a moonlit graveyard for a ghost who might declare her free of her abusive husband. Poor, skilled with herbs and descended from wise women, she knows the marshes of the south coast better than anyone. Instead of a ghost she meets James, a young man on the run from the war between King and Parliament, and leads him along the secret paths across the marsh, unaware of what she is bringing into her life.

The first Fairmile novel sets one woman's ambition against a village full of envy and witch-mania, where a woman without a husband is an easy target. Philippa Gregory writes the tidal landscape and its hard, ordinary lives with real care, and it suits anyone drawn to the overlooked women of English history.