The white earth remembers. But it has been called many things.Isle of Wight, 796 AD. The Saxons rule the island. The Jutish people who lived here for three centuries are nearly gone, their kings buried in barrows their descendants no longer dare to name. To survive, the last of the old bloodline have learned to bow their heads, hide their names, and wait.On a moonless autumn night, a man named Wulfherd carries his ten-year-old son to an ancient burial mound. He has come to steal a brooch from the grave of a forgotten king. His son will pay the price for what they take. So will his son's daughter. And her son, in turn, will use what they leave him to hold a kingdom together against the Northmen.Spanning three generations of Anglo-Saxon England, The Garnet Inheritance moves from a windswept island of barrows and bloodlines to the glittering, treacherous court of King Egbert of Wessex. It is the story of the cup-bearer who watched everything from the shadows, of the secrets passed from mother to daughter, and of a single piece of garnet cloisonné jewellery that carries the weight of a vanished people.At its heart stands Osburh: mother of Alfred the Great, and a woman the chronicles would have made nothing of. History almost forgot her. She made a chronicle of her own.For readers of Bernard Cornwell, Hilary Mantel, and Nicola Griffith, this is historical fiction rooted in real places and real silences: a sweeping, intimate debut about inheritance, survival, and the women history declined to record.
