Posie Graeme-Evans The Exiled

The Exiled

Posie Graeme-Evans

Atria, Jun 2005, $14.00, 416 pp.

ISBN: 074344373X

In the latter half of the fifteenth century in Brugge, Belgium, Anne de Bohun remembers what it is like to be a servant, but now enjoys the economic freedom of being ward to wealthy English merchant Sir Matthew Cuttifer. Knowing she probably can never go home though she misses her lover, Matthew's household makes it easier to raise her infant son Edward without his father, King Edward IV who cannot acknowledge his offspring.

Actually Anne is more of an apprentice than a ward as she learns the merchant business. She begins to successfully buy and sell including the trading of paintings, but also gains the wrath of her all male rivals who resent competition with a woman. Her enemies multiply in number and in intensity seeking anything to put her back in her place. She knows that if they learn the secret of her child's blue blood, death would stalk them.

This sequel continues the story of Anne started in the entertaining THE INNOCENT. The storyline provides a captivating perspective to the merchant world of 1560s Belgium where the heroine's male adversaries see her as an abomination that must be thwarted. Anne is a fabulous protagonist who serves as the focus of the tale almost reading like a work of biographical fiction. Posie Graeme-Evans writes a terrific medieval historical that will have her audience clamoring for the final novel in this stupendous saga.

Harriet Klausner