When Elizabeth of York is narrating her own story, Gregory drolly has her think, 'Of course there is an unbearable awkwardness between us.'Then comes marriage, and conception, and confinement, and eventually a son: little Prince Arthur, who will heal the divisions between York and Lancaster and rule as a new kind of king. In Gregory's telling, the marriage of Elizabeth of York to this squinty-eyed stranger is doubly or triply bitter: not only does Henry's behavior toward her before their marriage leave something to be desired (knee-jerk feminists will be outraged, but Gregory's depiction - of both the behavior and its aftermath - is probably photographically close to how things really were six hundred years ago, alas), but poor Elizabeth is still in love with Richard when she's forced to marry his killer. The decision Gregory made in both those novels - to turn from the main sequence of action in order to chase down distinctly side-chapel stories - oddly enough resembles the at times unfocused narrative of the York-Lancaster conflict itself, and with predictable results, as anyone who's ever read a history of that conflict will attest: fairly lengthy longueurs.Sharp focus returns with her latest novel, The White Princess, about that daughter of Elizabeth Woodville, sappy, cow-eyed, curly-lipped Elizabeth of York, who was forced by the rival families to marry the usurper Henry Tudor fresh from his victory over Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in the summer of 1485. They were followed by 2011's The Lady of the Rivers about Elizabeth Woodville's crazy mother and 2012's The Kingmaker's Daughter about Anne and Isabel Neville, the daughters of Warwick the 'Kingmaker' earl.

That book was followed in 2010 by The Red Queen, starring diminutive, inhuman Margaret Beaufort, the utterly terrifying mother of the young man who would become Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty.Both the Queen novels were superb - as tense as bow-strings and as concentrated as poison, utterly riveting storytelling.

2009's The White Queen dealt with Elizabeth Woodville, the comely idiot who captivated the heart (and other parts) of tall, gorgeous, muscular King Edward IV and gave him children, including the infamous 'Princes in the Tower' and a daughter named Elizabeth. The White Princess by Philippa GregoryTouchstone, 2013Bestselling historical novelist Philippa Gregory, whose The Other Boleyn Girl catapulted the Tudors back into cultural currency, has for the last few years been turning her attention to the sprawling, violent generational civil war that formed the fertile chaos preceding the Tudors, the Wars of the Roses between the rival houses of York and Lancaster.

The white queen book review