Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims

Magnificent. An historical tour de force, revealing Clements to be a novelist every bit as good as Cornwell, Gregory or Iggulden. Kingmaker is the best book I’ve read this year by some margin. * Ben Kane *
It’s amazing … there’s a real sense of time and place, and real immersion in the period, real rounded characters, with utterly plausible lives. Fantastic! People who love Conn Iggulden and Bernard Cornwell are going to love it too. * Manda Scott *
Toby Clements captures the grimness, grit and grime of 15th-century life, but with compassion and humanity, as seen through the eyes of common people … period detail is wonderfully accurate as are the setpiece skirmishes and bloodbath at Towton. * Daily Mail *
It is Clements’s ability to excite both tender emotions and a capacity for bloodthirstiness that has allowed him to achieve what Shakespeare couldn’t manage, and spin a consistently enthralling story out of the Wars of the Roses. * Daily Telegraph *
Clements truly lets rip with the poleaxes, billhooks and glaives, sparing no detail as he recreates the blood and thunder of the battlefield … But mere retro-bloodfest this is not - amid the butchery emerges a tender, heroic love story. * The Sun *
I loved this from the first page, and if you ask me, this is what it’s all about. There’s an immediacy, an accessibility to Clements’ writing that makes the story leap from the page in all its vivid, vibrant glory. In fact this story reads like a film script, which shows that here is a writer who knows his business. Atmosphere, drama, great characters and a brilliantly imagined medieval world - Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims took me on a journey. I’m already looking forward to the next one. Storytelling doesn’t get much better than this. * Giles Kristian *
The first of what promises to be one of the best historical adventure series to hit the shelves this year … an author born to be a storyteller … Kingmaker proves to be a thrilling, stomach-churning odyssey into the grime, gore and guts of the brutal medieval world. There is an addictive, raw excitement to Clements’ writing … Prepare to be shocked, amazed… and thoroughly entertained. * Lancashire Evening Post *
Epic adventuring that had me hooked… I loved this story, non-stop action featuring a lovely pair of modest but surprising heroes…The best adventure novel I have read in quite a while. * Bettie Book Likes blog *
If you like your fiction with a bit of grit and swagger, this is really something you should try. * The Idle Woman blog *
What a book! This superb novel, alive with fire, blood and mud, has brought me as close to the Wars of the Roses as I could ever want to get. Historical fiction at its best … Kingmaker is one of the finest historical novels I’ve read and fortunately it’s just the first in a trilogy. I look forward to much more from Toby Clements. * For Winter Nights blog *

Toby Clements was inspired to write Kingmaker- Winter Pilgrims having first become obsessed by the Wars of the Roses after a school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey, on the steps of which the Lancastrian claim to the English throne was extinguished in a welter of blood in 1471.

Since then he has read everything he can get his hands on and spent long weekends at re-enactment fairs. He has learned to use the longbow and how to fight with the poll axe, how to start a fire with a flint and steel and a shred of baked linen. He has even helped tan a piece of leather (a disgusting experience involving lots of urine and dog faeces).

Little by little he became less interested in the dealings of the high and mighty, however colourful and amazing they might have been, and more fascinated by the common folk of the 15th Century- how they lived, loved, fought and died. How tough they were, how resourceful, resilient and clever. As much as anything this book is a hymn to them.

He lives in London with his wife and three children. Winter Pilgrims is his first novel.

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