The sixth volume of Bulwer Lytton's monumental historical epic plunges into the vortex of the Wars of the Roses, where the mighty Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, finds his once-absolute power crumbling beneath the rise of the Lancastrian queen and her ambitious Woodville kin. In this installment, Warwick confronts a humiliating forced appointment to France while his daughter Isabel's marriage to Clarence becomes a chess piece in the brutal game of courtly power. The alchemist Adam Warner and his daughter Sibyll continue their poignant search for legitimacy and belonging amid the carnage of noble ambition, their personal struggle echoing the larger political convulsions tearing England apart. Bulwer Lytton renders the fifteenth century with extraordinary atmospheric density, the whispering conspirators in palace corridors, the trembling ground beneath rival armies, the desperate calculations of men who know that treason, like loyalty, carries only one price. This is historical fiction at its most operatic: a world where every marriage is a treaty, every betrayal a stepping stone, and the Kingmaker himself discovers he has built a throne he cannot sit upon.
