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Margaret George, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, comes from a Southern background and has traveled extensively. After reading numerous novels that viewed Henry VIII through the eyes of his enemies and victims, she became determined to let Henry speak for himself, and it took fifteen years, about three hundred books of background reading, three visits to England to see every extant building associated with Henry, and five handwritten drafts for her to answer the Question: What was Henry really like? She is also the author of two other highly acclaimed novels, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles and The Memoirs of Cleopatra. Much has been written about the mighty, egotistical Henry VIII: the man who dismantled the Church because it would not grant him the divorce he wanted; who married six women and beheaded two of them; who executed his friend Thomas More: who sacked the monasteries: who longed for a son and neglected his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth; who finally grew fat, disease-ridden, dissolute. Now, in her magnificent work of storytelling and imagination. Margaret George brings us Henry VIIIs story as he himself might have told it, in memoirs interspersed with irreverent comments from his jester and confidant, Will Somers. Brilliantly combining history, wit, dramatic narrative, and an extraordinary grasp of the pleasures and perils of power, this monumental novel shows us Henry the man more vividly than he has ever been seen before. Evocatively written as Henry VIIIs private journals, Margaret George tells the former kings life, using her now trademark mix of history and imagination to tell the story as he might have told it.