ROOK is Novel of the Week in The Tablet

Writing, Research and Rooks : Talk at... Is Harold II buried at Bosham Church?

ROOK is Novel of the Week in The Tablet

Happy New Year! I was thrilled to hear that ROOK is ‘Novel of the Week’ in The Tablet , the international Catholic news weekly, where artist and picture frame historian Lynn Roberts describes it as an ‘astonishingly vivid’ and ‘an utterly engrossing novel’.

Part of the review focuses on the 1066 scenes which, though only a tiny part of the novel in terms of total number of words, were key to the novel’s development and growth. The opening scene on the battlefield was one of the first to be written and, at the time, I didn’t understand why this scene felt so crucial.

Roberts says: ‘The scenes which bookend the contemporary narrative, dealing with the death of Harold in the Battle of Hastings and its aftermath for his common-law wife, Edith Swan-neck, are not only part of the inherited history of Bosham, but stand as an emblem of human grief and love.’