3 Copy Giveaway: The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora by Stella Duffy

Thanks to the generous people at Penguin Publishing I have 3 copies of THE PURPLE SHROUD, the follow up book to Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore by Stella Duffy up for grabs! 

About the Book

Publication Date:  September 25, 2012
Penguin Books
416p

{SYNOPSIS}

Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore, Stella Duffy's chronicle of this amazing woman's early years, delighted readers with its exquisite blend of historical detail and vivid storytelling. Now, The Purple Shroud chronicles Theodora at the height of her power, bringing the ancient world alive in another unforgettable, epic saga.

Theodora and Justinian have been crowned Emperor and Empress, but ruling an empire is no easy task. The two factions of Christianity are still battling for dogmatic supremacy, the Empire's borders are not secure, and Theodora worries about the ambitions of Justinian's two best generals. But the most pressing concern is close to home: Constantinople's two factions, the Blues and the Greens, are beginning to unite in their unhappiness with rising taxes. When that unhappiness spills over into all-out violence, thousands are killed (including someone very close to Theodora) and many of the City's landmarks are destroyed, including Theodora's beloved Hagia Sophia. In the aftermath of the riots, Theodora guides Justinian in gaining back the love and trust of the people, her unerring instinct for what the people want proving invaluable. Justinian promises to rebuild the Hagia Sophia to be even more spectacular than before. Theodora comes to realize that being the Augusta is simply another role she must play, though the stakes are much higher and there is no offstage. It's a role she was born to play.


GIVEAWAY (US ONLY)

- To enter, please leave a comment below and include your email address (only comments with email addresses will be entered in the giveaway).
- +5 additional entries become a follower of Passages to the Past. If you are already a follower you will automatically receive the bonus entries. 
- +3 additional entries join the Passages to the Past FB Page.
- +3 additional entries follow PTTP on Twitter.
- +1 additional entry each, please help spread the word by blogging, posting on sidebar, tweeting or posting this giveaway on Facebook or Google+.  You can use the SHARE buttons below.
- Giveaway ends on October 10th. 
 
GOOD LUCK TO ALL!

 
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Guest Post by Karleen Koen + Giveaway of Before Versailles

Please welcome author Karleen Koen to Passages to the Past today!  Her novel Before Versailles was released in paperback format from Sourcebooks on September 1st and she is here today with a guest post and giveaway.

Take it away, Karleen...



Hello again, thanks for having me one more time......since it's my choice on a blog post, I chose one from my blog, Writing Life, www.wordpress.karleenkoen.com.

....This was written in August of 2008, when I was not yet finished with Before Versailles. It shows the vulnerability, uncertainty, and trust that are part of writing a novel. This highlights some of the struggle and decision in writing...........
  
Louis, Louis

He was the rock star politician of his time, as if Franklin Roosevelt in his prime looked like a dark-haired Sting with a touch of Brad Pitt thrown in. But oddly enough, he isn’t the one who’s hard to write.

It’s the two women, Louise (de la Valliere, as she was known later) and Henriette (princess of England and France), both real, both intriguing, both loved him and were loved by him, and which is my heroine––that is the problem. I’ve decided and won’t spoil the plot of this book by telling all, but how I have wrestled with this, one draft focusing on one, the other draft on the other, and this draft, the polish/final (I hope, please, please) focusing on the winner.

Who’s the winner and why? The one who contributes most to the tension and forward motion of the story. The one who rises to the forefront in my imagination. In real life, I think they were both heroines. What an interesting point in history, Louis, the burgeoning young lion of Europe, loved by his sister-in-law, his wife, his sister-in-law’s maid of honor (and every other young woman in the vacinity….don’t we all love a star?).  And his breaking of the most powerful man in France and his own brother. To take this story and pull it apart and find the meat, the emotional arcs, the why we do things, the consequences of what we do, which is what I love best, has been such a challenge.

I hope, when it’s done (I think this fall, but it isn’t sold yet, so I don’t know when it will come out) that you think it’s worth it. I have tremendous respect for you…the reader. I am a reader, and I love nothing more than when an author scoops me up in spite of myself and takes me to another world. It’s what I attempt in my writing, to suspend time and place, to create another time and place, where real people walked and talked and loved and lost and survived anyway, just like we do.


About the Book

Paperback Publication Date:  September 2, 2012
Sourcebooks
400p

{SYNOPSIS}

Louis XIV is one of the best-known monarchs ever to grace the French throne. But what was he like as a young man—the man before Versailles?

After the death of his prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, twenty-two-year-old Louis steps into governing France. He’s still a young man, but one who, as king, willfully takes everything he can get—including his brother’s wife. As the love affair between Louis and Princess Henriette burns, it sets the kingdom on the road toward unmistakable scandal and conflict with the Vatican. Every woman wants him. He must face what he is willing to sacrifice for love.

But there are other problems lurking outside the chateau of Fontainebleau: a boy in an iron mask has been seen in the woods, and the king’s finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, has proven to be more powerful than Louis ever thought—a man who could make a great ally or become a dangerous foe . . .

Meticulously researched and vividly brought to life by the gorgeous prose of Karleen Koen, Before Versailles dares to explore the forces that shaped an iconic king and determined the fate of an empire.


For more information please visit Karleen Koen's WEBSITE.


GIVEAWAY (US & Canada)

- To enter, please leave a comment below and include your email address (only comments with email addresses will be entered in the giveaway).
- +5 additional entries become a follower of Passages to the Past. If you are already a follower you will automatically receive the bonus entries. 
- +3 additional entries join the Passages to the Past FB Page.
- +3 additional entries follow PTTP on Twitter.
- +1 additional entry each, please help spread the word by blogging, posting on sidebar, tweeting or posting this giveaway on Facebook or Google+.  You can use the SHARE buttons below.
- Giveaway ends on October 7th. 
 
GOOD LUCK TO ALL!

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Guest Post by Deborah Swift + Giveaway of The Gilded Lily

Passages to the Past is so honored to welcome author Deborah Swift to the blog today!  Deborah is currently on tour with Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours for her novel THE GILDED LILY and has stopped by today with a guest post and giveaway!

Hi Deborah, it's great to have you here at Passages to the Past!

*******

Thanks for the invitation to share this post, Amy.

I thought I would share with you two of the artists that inspired my descriptions in The Gilded Lily. When I began writing I looked at many images of 17th century London to find out about the detail of the period. Not for me the lavish courts of Charles II, the usual setting for novels of the 17th century, for my main characters are two sisters from a small rural village who arrive wide-eyed to the bustle of the London in winter.

Bold Ella Appleby and her timid sister Sadie are on the run, and they are soon sucked into the London underworld of gambling dens, coffee houses and taverns. Most paintings of the period are of the aristocracy so it was a while before I discovered Gerard Van Honthorst, a dutch artist painting earlier in the century whose style conveyed the dimly lit interiors I was wanting to portray. London in winter must have been a place flickering with the light of fires and candles, and dense with smoke from coal and tobacco.



Honthorst was an imitator of Caravaggio and excelled in painting scenes illuminated by candlelight, scenes that show men and women eating, musicians and card players. Here were the interiors that inspired me with their atmosphere, and here were the colourful close-up portraits I sought. He was also particularly good at portraying costume detail – the way the sleeves were tied on to the bodice in a contrasting colour, slashed and ruffled decoration, and feather hats and head-pieces.


Honthorst came from Utrecht, but was in England on a few occasions as he was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of Charles I. He painted court portraits and also religious scenes. He was so popular in the Netherlands that he was able to open a second studio in the Hague where he taught drawing, and painted members of the aristocracy. At the height of his popularity he had twenty four students studying under him, each paying him 100 guilders a year.


The second artist to inspire me was Visscher, with his Panorama of London, (these pictures from the London Museum) which is a wonderfully detailed drawing of London. Claes Jansz Visscher was a Dutch publisher, the first in a printing dynasty that spanned three generations. The Guildhall Library has the earliest copy of this map dated 1616. It shows the old St Paul’s Church before it was burnt down in the Great Fire of London and re-designed by Wren. The church’s truncated appearance is because it was actually struck by lightning in 1561 and lost its spire.



The other picture shows London Bridge. London Bridge was the only way of crossing the Thames other than by paying a waterman and going by boat. You can see how large the buildings were that the bridge had to support. No wonder there was a rhyme about it falling down! Also visible are the heads of criminals on spikes above the bridge. St Mary Overy, the church in the foreground later became Southwark Cathedral. Along with this drawing and several other detailed old maps I was able to navigate myself around the winding alleys of 17th century London.


In actual fact there is some doubt about the accuracy of this map, as it is believed to have been copied (with a degree of artistic licence) from an earlier map by Norden. However, it is one of the few clues remaining to us as to what London would have looked like in the 17th century.


For a much more detailed, beautifully hand-coloured close up of this map please visit
http://www.peterberthoud.co.uk/2012/09/visscher-panorama-of-london/


I hope you have enjoyed this little insight into my sources, and I thank Amy for hosting me.

ABOUT THE BOOK


Publication Date:  September 13, 2012
Pan Macmillan
304p

{SYNOPSIS}

Winter, 1661. In her short life Sadie Appleby has never left rural Westmorland. But one night she is rudely awoken by her older and bolder sister, Ella. She has robbed her employer and is on the run. Together the girls flee their home and head for London, hoping to lose themselves in the teeming city. But the dead man's relatives are in pursuit, and soon a game of cat and mouse ensues amongst the freezing warren that is London in winter. Ella is soon seduced by the glitter and glamour of city life and sets her sights on the flamboyant man-about-town, Jay Whitgift, owner of a beauty parlour for the wives of the London gentry. But nothing in the capital is what it seems, least of all Jay Whitgift. Soon a rift has formed between Ella and Sadie, and the sisters are threatened by a menace more sinister than even the law. Set in a brilliantly realised Restoration London, The Gilded Lily is a novel about beauty and desire, about the stories we tell ourselves, and about how sisterhood can be both a burden and a saving grace.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah Swift used to work in the theatre and at the BBC as a set and costume designer, before studying for an MA in Creative Writing in 2007. She lives in a beautiful area of Lancashire near the Lake District National Park.  She is the author of The Lady's Slipper and is a member of the Historical Writers Association, the Historical Novel Society, and the Romantic Novelists Association.

For more information, please visit www.deborahswift.co.uk

GIVEAWAY (International)

- To enter, please leave a comment below and include your email address (only comments with email addresses will be entered in the giveaway).
- +5 additional entries become a follower of Passages to the Past. If you are already a follower you will automatically receive the bonus entries. 
- +3 additional entries join the Passages to the Past FB Page.
- +3 additional entries follow PTTP on Twitter.
- +1 additional entry each, please help spread the word by blogging, posting on sidebar, tweeting or posting this giveaway on Facebook or Google+.  You can use the SHARE buttons below.
- Giveaway ends on October 5th. 
 
GOOD LUCK TO ALL!


The Gilded Lily UK Tour Button
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giveaway winners

Time to make some readers very excited!  Here are the winners of my recent giveaways...


  Kathy & Heather

 
Leah Weller

CONGRATUALTIONS!  Emails have been sent to the winners.

Thanks to all who entered the giveaway and helped spread the word and to the publishers for sponsoring the giveaways.

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Guest post by Elizabeth Chadwick + Giveaway of A Place Beyond Courage (US & CAN)

Passages to the Past is very excited to bring you a guest post with the fabulous Elizabeth Chadwick in honor of the Sourcebooks release of her novel A PLACE BEYOND COURAGE!  I have been a huge fan of Elizabeth Chadwick for years and recommend her books to anyone who will listen to me, so it's a big honor to have her here.

And thanks to Sourcebooks we also have a copy of A PLACE BEYOND COURAGE up for grabs, so be sure to enter the giveaway at the end of this post.

Welcome, Elizabeth and thank you for stopping by!


Clothing the Bones – the apparel of the well -dressed 12th century man

Many thanks for inviting me onto the blog. 

I thought it might be interesting to talk about the clothes that JohnF itzGilbert, the hero of A Place Beyond Courage would have worn in his everyday life. 

He was a member of the minor aristocracy and a court official, and could afford to be well if not spectacularly dressed. Clothes in the 12th century were worn to make a statement about rank. Only the nobility had the funds to buy costly vibrant dyes and finely woven yards of fabric. Only royalty or the greatest magnates and bishops could afford silk ,ermine and rich embroidery. For example, the purple dye manufactured in the middle eastern city of Tyre from sea snail shells, cost ounce per ounce more than gold. 

Back to John FitzGilbert. I want you to imagine a tall, well proportioned, strikingly handsome man, his brown-blond hair flashed with paler streaks where it has been brightened by the summer sun. He has intense blue eyes and a long stare that challenges both men and women, although in rather different ways and for different reasons! It might be risqué for me to ask you to imagine him without his clothes, but my excuse is that we are starting at the beginning and he is our model. 


To preserve his modesty (not that he would mind!) let's give him some underpants. In the mediaeval period these were called braies. Looking something like oversized boxer shorts, these linen drawers were worn by men at all levels of society. The only difference was in the quality of the linen. John's would have been of a finer, softer weave, perhaps imported from Flanders, from a linen manufacture town such as Cambrai (where the word cambric comes from), and rather than the grey colour shown in the photo, the material would have been pegged out in the sun to bleach, and would have been much paler, closer to white. Sometimes braies had slits in the bottom of the legs, and the hems were drawn up and tucked round the waistband to make a baggy loincloth. 


Now onto the trousers. In John Marshal's time, they were known as hose and also as chausses. The latter were slightly more high status than hose, but both performed the same basic function. The legs were completely separate and came up to high mid-thigh, where they then attached to the braies by means of straps and a belt. The look was rather like tight fitting chaps or waders. They fitted close to the leg and were generally made out of wool. A nobleman's hose would be dyed in rich colours and the wool would be close textured. If it was winter, John might wear thick socks on his feet made by a thread looping technique using one needle. You can see an example of this process here. It is sometimes known as naalbinding. 

John’s outdoor shoes would be made of strong cowhide, although perhaps he might wear some decoration on them such as a strip of woven silk or embroidery like this example. 

That's from waist to toe decently clothed. Now to the upper torso. First would come a shirt of linen, with ties at the neck, long, tight sleeves, and the hem reaching the top of the thighs. Again, the cloth would be fine. From existing laundry lists, we have evidence that the nobility at least, changed their undergarments once every three days. We don't have any statistics for the ordinary man who would not have possessed the same amount of clothing and would not have had a dedicated washer woman. 

On top of the shirt comes the tunic. For every day wear this was made of wool in winter and linen in summer. It is sometimes described as a T tunic because of its basic shape. It would often have had triangular gores at the side to increase the fullness and make the best use of the fabric which all had to be hand woven on looms, having been hand spun on drop spindles. The spinning wheel had yet to be invented and cloth production was a laborious business. 

As with the other garments, the fabric would be dyed in strong colours and the cloth would be fine. Some really fashion conscious men in the 12 century, went for floor length tunics so richly embellished and embroidered that they roused the disapproval of the church, who accused men of dressing like women! 

Over the tunic would go a circular woollen cloak, pinned high up on the shoulder by a round brooch of precious metal, perhaps studded with jewels, again as a mark of status. Everyone pinned their cloaks with brooches, the poor making do with plain ones of copper alloy that often turn up in metal detector finds today. 

The tunic would be belted, and the belt buckle would be of a form of brass, or perhaps bone such as this example here. John may also have worn a hat, but the exact form this would have taken is uncertain, but perhaps of rolled felt or even a beanie shape. He would also have rings on his fingers, set with a precious stone such as a sapphire or Ruby. These were imported from Sri Lanka, in the medieval times known as the land of Sarandib. 

If John was going riding he would put on his spurs, and if he was going to war his kit would reflect that in his mail shirt and quilted under tunic (known as a gambeson). However, the clothes I have given him today, will see him about his business round the court or at the Exchequer, and everyone will know him as a man of standing a wielder of power, a man who means business, who knows his business, and has a healthy sense of his own worth within the bounds of his station. A man whom other men will watch with deference and caution…and women, with a completely different look in their eyes! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Publication Date:  September 1, 2012
Sourcebooks
512p


SYNOPSIS


The early twelfth century is a time for ambitious men to prosper. John FitzGilbert is a man of honor and loyalty, sworn to royal service. When the old king dies, his successor rewards the handsome and ambitious John with castles and lands. But King Stephen has a tenuous hold on both his reign and his barons, and when jealous rivals at court seek to destroy John, he backs a woman's claim to the crown, sacrifices his marriage, and eventually is forced to make a gamble that is perhaps one step too far.

Rich with detail, masterful in its storytelling, A Place Beyond Courage is a tale of impossible gambles and the real meaning of honor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Chadwick (UK) is the author of 17 historical novels, including The Greatest Knight, The Scarlet Lion, A Place Beyond Courage, Lords of the White Castle, Shadows and Strongholds, the Winter Mantle, and The Falcons of Montabard, four of which have been shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists' Awards.  

For more information, visit www.elizabethchadwick.com.

GIVEAWAY (US & CAN)

- To enter, please leave a comment below and include your email address (only comments with email addresses will be entered in the giveaway).
- +5 additional entries become a follower of Passages to the Past. If you are already a follower you will automatically receive the bonus entries. 
- +3 additional entries join the Passages to the Past FB Page.
- +3 additional entries follow PTTP on Twitter.
- +1 additional entry each, please help spread the word by blogging, posting on sidebar, tweeting or posting this giveaway on Facebook or Google+.  You can use the SHARE buttons below.
- Giveaway ends on September 21st. 

GOOD LUCK TO ALL!
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2013 Release: The Aviator's Wife by Melanie Benjamin


Release Date: February 19, 2013 |Delacorte Press |416p 

{SYNOPSIS} 

In the spirit of Loving Frank and The Paris Wife, acclaimed novelist Melanie Benjamin pulls back the curtain on the marriage of one of America’s most extraordinary couples: Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
 
For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Enthralled by Charles’s assurance and fame, Anne is certain the celebrated aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong.
 
Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making wedding. Hounded by adoring crowds and hunted by an insatiable press, Charles shields himself and his new bride from prying eyes, leaving Anne to feel her life falling back into the shadows. In the years that follow, despite her own major achievements—she becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States—Anne is viewed merely as the aviator’s wife. The fairy-tale life she once longed for will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life’s infinite possibilities for change and happiness.
 
Drawing on the rich history of the twentieth century—from the late twenties to the mid-sixties—and featuring cameos from such notable characters as Joseph Kennedy and Amelia Earhart, The Ambassador’s Daughter is a vividly imagined novel of a complicated marriage—revealing both its dizzying highs and its devastating lows. With stunning power and grace, Melanie Benjamin provides new insight into what made this remarkable relationship endure.
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