The Great Level

A rich and compelling portrait of a tragic love affair in a threatened world

Stella Tillyard has done that magical thing - combined solid historical research with an ethereal sense of the past. Her New Amsterdam in America is as wonderfully realised as the shifting world of the Fens in England. It’s a haunting book with characters who stay with the reader as their lives unfold like a sea mist

The Great Level proves worth the seven-year wait… This is an impressive piece of work, rich in historical detail and human insight

Rousing and heroic... this is a novel of large vision and careful detail... [Tillyard] paddles her coracle deep into little-known channels and conjure atmospheres as thick as still summer air over the meres... Richly involving… The story of a strange and passionate relationship

Historian Stella Tillyard's first fictional outing, Tides of War, earned her a 2012 Orange Prize nomination. Her second novel similarly showcases her skills as a chronicler of period and place... Fans of Rose Tremain will find much to admire in Tillyard's richly detailed and atmospheric romance

There is much to love in The Great Level - Tillyard writes with great authority...and the book has the smack of authenticity. The passages that Eliza narrates...are wonderful

Historian Tillyard has a real feeling for the period and captures the pioneering spirit of the times, bristling with new challenges. But it is Jan's love for Eliza [...] that elicits the best and tenderest writing in the book. His understated emotions are extraordinarily poignant

Stella Tillyard's assured and entrancing second novel deserves a place of honour on this too-short Fenland shelf... A historian and biographer, Tillyard brings to her 17th-century plot and people a deep concern for accuracy, and a respect for the look and feel of the past, that never slides into fussy pedantry

A novel filled with atmospheric detail and memorable characters

Every phrase [is] weighed and shaped to reflect a slower, more relevant age… it is perfect for expressing this awed sense of uncharted nature as mysterious, beautifully locating us in the 17th century

Beautiful... the book has a painterly quality... [Tillyard] has a wonderful way with words and arresting images, and the writing is delightfully limpid throughout

This is the most beautiful historical novel you'll read all year; reminiscent of Marguerite Yourcenar at her very best in its lyrical grace and poetic intensity... Extraordinary

If you want to be utterly transported to another time, another place – read Stella Tillyard's The Great Level. A haunting depiction of love and difference in the marshy seventeenth-century Fens

Stella Tillyard is a writer and historian whose acclaimed biographies include Aristocrats, Citizen Lord and A Royal Affair. Her first novel, Tides of War, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. She has lived in the USA and Italy and now lives in London.

A ‘magical, haunting’ (Philippa Gregory) novel of a tragic love affair in a threatened world 
 
In 1649, Jan Brunt, a Dutchman, arrives in England to work on draining and developing the Great Level, an expanse of marsh in the heart of the fen country. It is here he meets Eliza, whose love overturns his ordered vision and whose act of resistance forces him to see the world differently. 
 
 Jan flees to the New World, where the spirit of avarice is raging and his skills as an engineer are prized. Then one spring morning a boy delivers a note that prompts him to remember the fens, and confront all that was lost there. 
 
‘The most beautiful historical novel you’ll read all year… Extraordinary’ 
 Simon Schama 
 
‘Richly involving… The story of a strange and passionate relationship’ 
 Guardian 
 
‘If you want to be utterly transported to another time, another place, read The Great Level. A haunting depiction of love and difference’ 
 Amanda Vickery

King in Waiting

George IV (Penguin Monarchs)

George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king: as a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the sixty-year reign of his father, George III, and for ten years as Prince Regent, when his father went mad. 
 
'The days are very long when you have nothing to do' he once wrote plaintively, but he did his best to fill them with pleasure - women, art, food, wine, fashion, architecture. He presided over the creation of the Regency style, which came to epitomise the era, and he was, with Charles I, the most artistically literate of all our kings. Yet despite his life of luxury and indulgence, George died alone and unmourned. 
 
Stella Tillyard has not written a judgemental book, but a very human and enjoyable one, about this most colourful of all British kings.

excellent... Tillyard offers insightful and balanced analysis of this ambivalent figure

Stella Tillyard is one of Britain's best-selling historians, notably Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832, winner of the History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, which became a BBC/WGBH series, A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings, Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-98, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize, and a novel, Tides of War. She lives in London and Florence.

Tides of War

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, Tides of War is a sweeping epic set against the backdrop of Regency England and the battlefields of the Peninsular War.

Hugely enjoyable... Intelligent, classy, entertaining

Seldom, since reading Jane Austen, have I so wanted to slip between the pages of a book and become one of its characters… She makes fiction as real as history and considerably more compelling

Marvellous... Her descriptions are wonderful

Tillyard perfectly inhabits her period... Gradually the plot's threads tighten to reveal a perfectly sprung novel

Dazzling - I love this book. It's beautifully written, the characters are deeply involving and the historical settings are so right - in short, Tides of War is a triumph

One of the most assured debuts in years...a modern novel that is the perfect answer to anyone who thinks the past is out of date

Tides of War is elegantly written, with passages of verve and...poignancy

A perfectly sprung novel of the sort that owes more to Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell than Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwall

Love, betrayal, war and peace charge this powerful debut

Tillyard writes in fluid, largely understated prose and her descriptions are wonderful

Tillyard is a fluent and attractive chronicler of detail and some of her imaginative liberties are ingenious

This saga of lives swept up in the Peninsular War recalls Georgette Heyer at her best...impossible to put down

A thrilling romance brought to life with exquisite detail

A prodigious talent able to combine meticulous research with novelistic devices...there is much to enjoy and admire

Fluently written and impeccably researched

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time

Stella Tillyard has been described by Simon Schama as 'dazzling...a phenomenally gifted writer'. Her books include Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox,1740-1832; Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798, and most recently A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings. She has lived in the USA and Italy and now lives in London.

Newly-wed Harriet stands poised on the threshold of the adult world. Her husband, James, is setting off to join the Duke of Wellington's troops in Spain and left alone in London, Harriet is taken under the wing of Lady Wellington. While Harriet plunges into a new life of freedom at home, James faces the bloody reality of the battlefield. 
 
As war rages abroad and England stands on the brink of change, Harriet and James face hope and heartache in equal measure. From the mantillas and palms of Seville to the gas lamps of foggy London, Tides of War returns us to the vivid, lost world of the past.

Edward Fitzgerald 1763-1798

Citizen Lord

This is the biography of 18th century revolutionary Edward Fitzgerald, the son of Emily Lennox, one of the sisters featured in ARISTOCRATS. Edward Fitzgerald was born in 1763. He spent his child-hood in Ireland. In 1780 he joined the army and sailed to America where he fought in the war for independendence. Back home he was elect ed to the Irish Parliament and became a member of the Irish opposition His political interests became increasingly radical, and he was eventually embroiled in the Irish rebellion, dying in prison. His life was extraordinary colourfuland dramatic: as complex and interesting in its political dimension as in his love life. CITIZEN LORD, sequel to ARISTOCRATS is the second in a trilogy of works about an extended aristocratic family between 1740 and 1830. The third will be about the men of the family, their military exploits and changing home lives.

Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

Aristocrats

‘Aristocrats is my favourite kind of history: on the one hand it’s lucid and scholarly, on the other hand it reads like a novel. I hated to finish it’ - Antonia Fraser

A dazzling achievement: an extraordinary story told by a phenomenally gifted writer. Within its gripping narrative lies a wonderfully rich reconstruction of the world of the Hanoverian elite, its virtues and vices wittily and movingly related

Aristocrats is a wonderful panorama of a book

Their story is on one level as hard to put down as any of the fashionable French novels that were Caroline's favourite reading. On another it re-explores a century's history seen, so to speak, inside out through the eyes of four remarkable women who started young, lived long, did much, wrote more and have found a scarcely less remarkable biographer in Stella Tillyard

Tillyard's moving and often brilliant book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of aristocracy and enormously entertaining reading for everyone else

Stella Tillyard has been described by Simon Schama as 'dazzling...a phenomenally gifted writer'. Her books include Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox,1740-1832; Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald, 1763-1798, A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings, and, most recently, Tides of War, longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012. She has lived in the USA and Italy and now lives in London.

A fascinating insight into 18th century aristocratic life through the lives of the four Lennox sisters, the great grandchildren of Charles II, whose extraordinary lives spanned the period 1740-1832. Passionate, witty and moving, the voices of the Lennox sisters reach us with immediacy and power, drawing the reader into their remarkable lives, and making this one of the most enthralling historical narratives to appear for many years.

Stella Tillyard

A joy to read, full of wit and fascinating detail. This is history told by a master storyteller

Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura

A very good read. There is pace, colour and well-researched writing

In this superbly engrossing and revelatory book, Tillyard's detective instincts and clever narrative structure work together to inform and delight

Dr Tillyard's masterful and entertaining accounts of the fates of George's brothers are poignant reminders of the curse of being born royal

A ripping good yarn, told with convincing authority

The numerous fans of her Aristocrats (in which number I include myself) will not be disappointed: here is the same judicious mixture of intimacy and scholarship

A Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura

She has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence

The story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples

George III and his Troublesome Siblings

The young George III was a poignant figure, humdrum on the surface yet turbulent beneath: hiding his own passions, he tried hard to be a father to his siblings and his nation. This intimate, fast-moving book tells their intertwined stories. His sisters were doomed to marry foreign princes and leave home forever; his brothers had no role and too much time on their hands - a recipe for disaster. 
 
At the heart of Tillyard's story is Caroline Mathilde, who married the mad Christian of Denmark in her teens, but fell in love with the royal doctor Struensee: a terrible fate awaited them, despite George's agonized negotiations. At the same time he faced his tumultuous American colonies. And at every step a feverish press pounced on the gossip, fostering a new national passion - a heated mix of celebrity and sex.

Stella Tillyard

Praise for A Royal Affair

A joy to read, full of wit and fascinating detail. This is history told by a master storyteller

A rollickingly good read

Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura

A joy to read, full of wit and fascinating detail. This is history told by a master storyteller

A rollickingly good read

Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura

A joy to read, full of wit and fascinating detail. This is history told by a master storyteller

A rollickingly good read

Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura

Books by Stella Tillyard

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