Book
The Swan-Daughter
First published 2014
England, 1075. Gunhild of Wessex, daughter of Harold Godwinson and Edith the Fair, has grown up in the shadow of the Norman Conquest. After years associated with Wilton Abbey, she faces a choice between the security expected of a defeated royal house and a life with Alan Rufus, the powerful Breton lord whose fortunes were made under William the Conqueror.
Their relationship brings together two families on opposite sides of 1066. Questions of inheritance, loyalty and love are inseparable from the redistribution of land and status that followed the conquest. By centring Gunhild, McGrath turns the aftermath of Hastings into a story about what happened to the next generation: those who inherited the memory of a lost kingdom but had to negotiate their lives inside Norman England.
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