Crouchback

This is a fine English historical novel set during the Wars of the Roses. It focuses on the fortunes of the daughter of Warwick the Kingmaker, Anne Neville, who was married first to the Lancastrian Edward Prince of Wales, and then the Yorkist Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III. This unjustly neglected work is a beautifully-written glimpse into the manners and mores of 15th-century England, with penetrating character-studies of the principle figures of the Wars of the Roses, especially of Anne Neville, a sheltered and somewhat simple girl ruthlessly used as a pawn by great nobles in their dynastic strategies, and of the enigmatic Richard Plantagenet.