COMING OCTOBER 2025
She survives four queens. Will she fall to a tyrant?
Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court. Where nothing is more powerful than a secret – or more deadly.
As the Boleyns rise, Jane rises with them. But the king’s love is a fickle thing. And when the royal gaze turns elsewhere, Jane uses the only weapon she has: her voice.
To survive in this dazzling, dangerous world she has mastered many masks: loving wife, devoted sister, and obedient spy. Now she must step out of the shadows.
She might outlive her rivals. She might know the court’s darkest secrets. But power rests on the edge of a tyrant king’s sword. Where will it fall next?
Released in 2025
This is my first return to the Tudor court and to the Boleyn family in more than a decade – and people are asking me why return? The heroine of the novel has been on my mind for all this time and recent biographies of her only added to the mystery. Her reputation has changed during that time – and changed several times over the centuries earlier: she was accused of treason, been condemned as a nymphomaniac, diagnosed as a sociopath and – more recently – defended as a victim of circumstances. But her real story is far more complex. And I am a different author now than the young woman at the start of her career who wrote The Other Boleyn Girl. I come back to this period with extra decades of thinking about the potential of women and the dangers of tyranny. Seeing Jane as a survivor, acting in her own interests, restores to her the independence and will that I believe all Tudor women had and awoman at court could not have succeeded without. So this is a revisionist fictional biography – set in a revisionist fictional history.
Book opens in 1534
Jane Boleyn served five of Henry VIII’s six queens - an outstanding career as a courtier. Against all odds, Jane survived the show trials that took her sister-in-law and husband and their friends to the scaffold, and the purges of new queens. She came to court as a little girl, her father was Henry Parker, Lord Morley, a famous scholar - we actually have a list of the translations he made for Henry and for Princess Mary as New Year’s gifts. His scholarship inspired me to imagine Jane as his student – one of the highly-educated Tudor girls. Jane married a rising courtier – George Boleyn – and benefited from the Boleyn rise to royalty. What is inexplicable is that she survived the fall of the Boleyns and continued as lady in waiting to the next queen, Jane Seymour.
Reviews
"Gregory skillfully captures the lust for power and wealth that overcomes those who serve a mentally unstable ruler. Readers will gain insight about life at the royal court of Henry VIII and his uncontrolled power. —Joanna Burkhardt"
The Library Review
