Ten top books about royal families

Deborah Cadbury's latest book is Queen Victoria's Matchmaking: The Royal Marriages that Shaped Europe. One of the author's top ten books about royal families, as shared at the Guardian:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Mantel brings the Tudor court alive with the immediacy of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, its ambiguous “hero” Thomas Cromwell giving us his private view of Henry VIII and his family. In her Reith lectures, Mantel described the process of writing a historical novel as “entering into a dramatic process” in which she hoped to activate the senses and find “the one detail that lights up the page”.

Read about the other books on the list.

Wolf Hall made Peter Stanford's top ten list of Protestants in fiction, Melissa Harrsion's ten top depictions of British rain, the Telegraph's list of the 21 greatest television adaptations of novels, BBC Culture's list of the 21st century’s twelve greatest novels, Ester Bloom's ten list of books for fans of the television series House of Cards, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Kathryn Williams's reading list on pride, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of books on baby-watching in Great Britain, Julie Buntin's top ten list of literary kids with deadbeat and/or absent dads, Hermione Norris's 6 best books list, John Mullan's list of ten of the best cardinals in literature, the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five books on dangerous minds and Lev Grossman's list of the top ten fiction books of 2009, and is one of Geraldine Brooks's favorite works of historical fiction; Matt Beynon Rees called it "[s]imply the best historical novel for many, many years."

--Marshal Zeringue