A love story blighted by events in an England emerging from war, plague and the Puritan age, is a brand new novel, destined to set pulses racing.
The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter is the latest paperback released by an acclaimed Yorkshire writer, who has already penned half a dozen successful novels.
Set around the times of Cromwell, an age of Puritanism when the zealous Protestants and their spies were ready to condemn anyone who dared to stray from their strict regulations.
It wasn’t an easy time for love, or even lust, to thrive, and yet, despite the many pitfalls and problems, it did.
The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter, which is already getting five star reviews on Amazon, is a love story beset with challenges – war, separation and accusations of witchcraft for starters. There is plenty of drama with arson, plague and hysteria and a dark side in the world of crime, from sheep rustling to murder.
About the author
Amanda Taylor’s books are a mix of historical dramas, crime thrillers, mysteries and true stories reimagined as fiction. When you learn of her background and her life it is no surprise to discover she has a rich seam of experience to draw on.
Educated in Leeds, Amanda Taylor did some magazine work before winning a national poetry prize. She played squash for her county for nine years and successfully completed a relay swim of the English Channel.
Amanda Taylor believes she was destined to write, and drama was never far away from her door. Writing is definitely in the genes, as both her parents were journalists.
Her father was a crime reporter and he and her mum had met and fallen in love just after the Second World War. In the course of his work her dad had been alerted to a crime story – the discovery of a woman’s head, that of Ethel Wraithmell, in a village just outside Leeds. The head was in a hedge, near a house that was up for sale, and being a pragmatic Yorkshireman and needing a home he took the opportunity to enquire, and it became the couple’s first home.
Today, she writes from her home between Wharfedale and Nidderdale, looking out from a small room across the grouse moor and distracted only by the wildlife and the call of the curlew.
It’s a rustic, tranquil scene and full of history. It is here that she has penned this latest historical novel, The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter.
About the novel
Charles I is executed with the words ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be.’ And his son, Charles II is set to replace him on the throne.
Sir Thomas Huck, a Royalist army doctor is returning to Cornwall from exile, carrying scars from the Civil War. His heart still yearns with desire for Iben Hartmann, the tombstone maker’s daughter.
But these are turbulent times, as the country emerges from that Puritanical grip, and he wants to know what makes the once free-spirited Iben love one minute and despise the next.
Extracts from The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter
A horseman watches a woman on the beach below. It had been all of eighteen years or more. The ending had come in autumn, a suitable season for endings.
He had never known anyone who thought like her, expressed herself like she did. He had grown to love her deeply, yet she had given him so much more pain than kindness and love. He stood by his horse, high on the cliff, watching her. He was partially concealed in sand dunes and the grey-green tufts of marram grass. He never thought he would see this beach and sea again. He never thought he would live to see her again.
Today he desperately wanted to see her without being seen. He traced his fingertips down the raised scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his mouth. Not like this—never like this…
Since his years of exile in France, he had to admit he was more than familiar with women’s plain gowns and petticoats, and regrettably what lay beneath them. Such pleasures were fleeting, never lasting, failed to fulfil him. The love of flesh alone, wasn’t love at all.
The woman on the beach
Someone was watching her. She sat on a rush mat on the beach examining and separating stones. Her cream petticoat and green overdress billowing about her like an exotic nest.
With Cromwell dead, it was a relief to have some colour back in her life. Gone were the drab greys and browns of the Puritan age.
She jingled the pebbles together—orange, pink, red and blues. No rare gems to be had here. Disappointed, she threw them all back onto the sand.
That is when she saw it. Reaching out she stretched forward, too lazy to get to her feet. She examined the hag stone carefully. A lucky fairy stone, a small perfect hole bored through the middle. She could do with some luck. Her village could do with a little luck at this moment in time. The whole of England could do with some luck going into the future. She rolled the stone in the palm of her hand and prayed silently that it would protect her against curses and pestilence.
Buy the book
Visit the author’s website here for details of her other books, and how and where to buy The Tombstone Maker’s Daughter, including Waterstones, WH Smith and Amazon.
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