Gary asked Sharon Kay Penman:

Thank you some of these are my favourites too Did Rosemary Hawley Jarman's We Speak No Treason have an impact. I alos like James Michener especially The Source , Caribbean and Poland Have you read The Source? Ive just read A Dangerous Inheritance by Alison Weir and she seems of the opinion that Richard III was involved in the murder of the princes in the tower.

Sharon Kay Penman Hi, Gary. I did not read We Speak no Treason. When I was researching and writing Sunne, I deliberately stayed away from other novels about the Yorkists, not wanting to be influenced, even unconsciously, by how other writers dealt with the mystery of the Young Princes in the Tower. I thought that I'd read these books once Sunne was done, but after I finished, I discovered to my surprise that I did not want to read any other writer's book about the Yorkists. I was too emotionally invested in the characters by then; it did take me 12 years to finish Sunne, after all, which is a long time to share my life with the Yorkists. Since then, I have not read other novels about the Yorkists or the Welsh princes or the Angevins, even when the other author was a friend of mine. This is not my peculiarity; I know other writers who do not want to read another author's treatment of "their" historical figures. There is a lot that Alison Weir and I do not agree about, and Richard III is just one of those topics. I did read the Source but that was many years ago. Truthfully, the only one of his vast sagas that utterly resonated with me was Hawaii.

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