Christopher John Sansom is a British writer of historical crime novels, best known for his Matthew Shardlake series. He was born in 1952 in Edinburgh and attended George Watson's College in that city, but left the school with no qualifications. Sansom has written about the bullying he suffered there. Subsequently he was educated at the University of Birmingham, where he took a BA and then a PhD in history. After working in a variety of jobs, he decided to retrain as a solicitor. He practised in Sussex as a lawyer for the disadvantaged, before leaving the legal profession to become a full-time writer. He lives in Sussex.
Gabrielle Drake is a British actress. She appeared in the 1970s in television series The Brothers and UFO. In the early 1970s she appeared in several erotic roles on screen. She later took parts in soap operas Crossroads and Coronation Street. She has also had a stage career.
The Songs of Kings was a novel published in 2002 by Barry Unsworth that retells the story of Iphigenia at Aulis told by the Greek tragic poet Euripides.
Sid Chaplin was an English writer whose works are mostly set in the north-east of England, in the 1940s and 1950s.
Colin MacDonald was born in 1956 in Inverness, Scotland. He is a prolific writer for television and radio. Television credits include The Dunroamin' Rising (BBC1), The Gift (BBC1), The Wreck on the Highway (BBC1), Sharpe's Honour (ITV) and episodes in the series Blue Murder (ITV), Heartbeat (ITV), Casualty (BBC1), and Para Handy (BBC1). Radio credits include Killing the Butterfly, Hill of Rains, The Colour of Summer, King of Hearts, The Stanley Baxter Playhouse: The Hat and Calum's Road. In 2021, BBC Radio 4 aired a full-cast adaptation of C. J. Sansom's mystery novel Lamentation, dramatised by MacDonald, with Justin Salinger starring as Shardlake.
Dissolution (2003) is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom's first published novel, and the first in the Matthew Shardlake Series. It was dramatised by BBC Radio 4 in 2012.
Dark Fire is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom's second novel, released in 2004, and also the second in the Matthew Shardlake Series. Set in the 16th century during the reign of Tudor King Henry VIII, it follows hunchbacked lawyer Shardlake's search to recover the long-lost formula for Greek fire.
Sovereign, published in 2006, is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom's fourth novel and the third in the Matthew Shardlake Series. Set in the 16th century during the reign of King Henry VIII, it follows hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak as they investigate a series of murders and a plot to question the legitimacy of the line of succession to the English throne.
Revelation is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom's fifth novel, and the fourth in the Matthew Shardlake Series. Set in 1543 during the reign of King Henry VIII, it follows hunchbacked lawyer Shardlake and his assistant, Jack Barak as they hunt the killer of a fellow lawyer.
Peter Ackroyd, is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charles Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Heartstone is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom's sixth novel, and the fifth in the Matthew Shardlake Series. Set in the 16th century during the reign of King Henry VIII, the events of the novel take place in the summer of 1545. Shardlake and his assistant Barak travel to Portsmouth on a legal case given to them by an old servant of Queen Catherine Parr. The book also concerns preparations for the Battle of the Solent and the King's warship, the Mary Rose.
The House of Silk is a Sherlock Holmes novel written by British author Anthony Horowitz, published in 2011. The book was promoted with the claim it was the first time the Conan Doyle Estate had authorised a new novel that is not a Sherlock Holmes pastiche.
Oxygen is the third novel by English author, Andrew Miller, released on 6 September 2001 through Sceptre. Although the novel received mixed reviews, it was shortlisted for both a Man Booker Prize and a Whitbread Award in 2001.
The Shardlake series is a series of historical mystery novels by C. J. Sansom, set in the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century.
Ann Firbank is an actress of film, television, and stage whose career extends from 1956. One of Firbank's more notable roles is her 1971 portrayal of Anne Elliot in the serial Persuasion, an adaptation of Jane Austen's novel of the same name.
Tombland is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is the seventh book in the Matthew Shardlake series, following 2014's Lamentation. Set in the summer of 1549, the story deals with the investigation of a murder in Norfolk. Matthew Shardlake is entrusted by Princess Elizabeth, later Elizabeth I, to investigate the murder of the wife of a distant relative of hers. During the course of the investigation Shardlake gets involved in Kett's Rebellion.
Middle England is a 2018 novel by Jonathan Coe. It is the third novel in a trilogy, following The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004). The novel explores the experiences of characters from those earlier novels against the backdrop of the major events taking place before, during and after the Brexit referendum.
Will Eaves is a British writer, poet and professor at the University of Warwick.
The Thursday Murder Club is the debut novel by Pointless and House of Games presenter Richard Osman. It was published on 3 September 2020 by Viking Press, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.
