The Councillor — Diana Fox

In 'The Councillor', Diana Fox has created an immensely imaginative consideration of a fraught and dangerous period of English History - the late Middle Ages, the time before the first English Renaissance monarch, King Henry VIII, bestrode the stage. Two men meet, uncle and nephew, in a strange half world, a world between life and death, between heaven and hell; but not purgatory, as the Church then knew it; for the dogmas of the Church have no place in this imaginative vision of eternity; rather, a place where all things are at last made clear to the soul that is no longer earthbound; a pause on a journey that embraces many lives. Both had, in their earth lives, been kings; the older, King Henry VI of Lancaster, and the younger, his nephew, King Henry VII, Henry Tudor, the first of England's Tudor rulers, and the father of that cruel and bluff King Hal who would usher in the modern age. Together they talk through the blood-soaked events of that anarchic period,! the period of the Wars of the Roses, the Little Princes in the Tower, and much else, and together they arrive at an understanding of their own past and a greater future.