Flora Chapman is in her fifties when her husband dies in a bizarre ballooning accident. Seizing upon her new found freedom, she decides to finish the history of their village that Edward had begun. A reference to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife who he rejected for being ugly, captures her imagination as she begins to delve deeper into the life of this neglected figure. Meanwhile, in the Louvre, Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves senses the tug of a connection and she begins to tell the story of the injustices she suffered and just how she survived her marriage…

“A brilliantly funny, warm, intelligent read” – The Times

“Her concise, ironic and zeugmatic style is a sustaining joy on every page: you want to read whole paragraphs aloud to anyone who’ll listen. And you don’t want it to end.” – Independent on Sunday