Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England, Thomas Penn

This title is nominated for "Sunday Times", "Daily Telegraph", "TLS", "Financial Times", "Guardian", "Daily Mail" and "Sunday Telegraph" Books Of The Year. "He were a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious, and his times full of secret conspiracies and troubles". (Sir Francis Bacon). In his remarkable debut, Penn vividly recreates the dark and turbulent reign of Henry VII. He traces the transformation of a young, vulnerable boy, Prince Henry, into the aggressive teenager who would become Henry VIII, and of Catherine of Aragon, his future queen. And at the book's heart is the tragic, magnetic figure of Henry VII - controlling, paranoid, avaricious, with a Machiavellian charm and will to power.