Soaringly romantic and psychologically nuanced, Undest's novel is also a meticulous re-creation of a world split between pagan codes of retribution and the rigors of Christian piety - a world where law is a fragile new invention and manslaughter is so common that it's punishable by fine.

    The daughter of a wealthy mill-owner and one of five children – Gordon, Denis, Janet, Lorna, Cecily and Bunny – she is tormented by the high walls of their home, White Lodge, which hold her in. The young Millicent tells her father that she is destined for great things – that she is desperate to break free. . .But while Millicent’s siblings grow up, move on and experience life, their freedom confines her. Held back by the bonds of family, unable to leave her siblings behind, Millicent appears to miss out on the joys of life. But as time goes on, she becomes the centre that holds her family together. Perhaps Millicent’s great destiny was, after all, to remain at home; remain at one with those who love her most and see out her final days in the warmth of the White Lodge. Tender, humorous, gentle and quietly devastating, Millicent Dorrington is the powerful story of a woman, a mother and a friend.

    From his earliest childhood he sees it growing in beauty through the efforts of the master craftsmen who are at work on it. When he is ten years old, he is apprenticed to a goldsmith, and begins his education in the arts. The story of his career, his escapades, his ambitions, and his final success, is enthralling. But it is not Jean alone who interests us. Through his eyes the child sees the bustling town of Reims in the fourteenth century, with its crafts and guilds, its merchants and its beggars, its nobles and its soldiers. He hears too of the Maid of Orleans, and her fight for France. Miss Lownsbery combines historic truth and accuracy with an interesting and living story. No textbook would give a child so vivid a picture as this does, and few other stories will so completely capture his imagination.