Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims: (Book 1) - Tapa dura

"Magnificent. An historical tour de force, revealing Clements to be a novelist every bit as good as Cornwell, Gregory or Iggulden. Kingmaker is the best book I’ve read this year by some margin." (Ben Kane)

"It’s amazing ... there’s a real sense of time and place, and real immersion in the period, real rounded characters, with utterly plausible lives. Fantastic! People who love Conn Iggulden and Bernard Cornwell are going to love it too." (Manda Scott)

"Toby Clements captures the grimness, grit and grime of 15th-century life, but with compassion and humanity, as seen through the eyes of common people ... period detail is wonderfully accurate as are the setpiece skirmishes and bloodbath at Towton." (Daily Mail)

"It is Clements’s ability to excite both tender emotions and a capacity for bloodthirstiness that has allowed him to achieve what Shakespeare couldn’t manage, and spin a consistently enthralling story out of the Wars of the Roses." (Daily Telegraph)

"Kingmaker is a huge work; intelligent, well-researched, entertaining ... and even, better, there's stacks more to come." (Sunday Sport)

‘My best historical novel is Winter Pilgrims. Toby Clements’ blood-fuelled ‘I was there’ rampage through the Wars of the Roses’ Hilary Mantel

February, 1460: in the bitter dawn of a winter’s morning a young nun is caught outside her priory walls by a corrupt knight and his vicious retinue.

In the fight that follows, she is rescued by a young monk and the knight is defeated. But the consequences are far-reaching, and Thomas and Katherine are expelled from their religious Orders and forced to flee across a land caught in the throes of one of the most savage and bloody civil wars in history: the Wars of the Roses.

Their flight will take them across the Narrow Sea to Calais where Thomas picks up his warbow, and trains alongside the Yorkist forces. Katherine, now dressed as a man, hones her talents for observation and healing both on and off the fields of battle. And all around them, friends and enemies fight and die as the future Yorkist monarch, Edward, Earl of March, and his adviser the Earl of Warwick, later to become known as the Kingmaker, prepare to do bloody battle.

Encompassing the battles of Northampton, Mortimer's Cross and finally the great slaughter of Towton, this is war as experienced not by the highborn nobles of the land but by ordinary men and women who do their best just to stay alive. Filled with strong, sympathetic characters, this is a must-read series for all who like their fiction action-packed, heroic and utterly believable.