Doom Painting

It is 1381. England, reeling from plague and years of conflict abroad, is a tinderbox waiting to spark. Two childhood friends ride into the town of Brentwood, Essex, where they come upon an altercation with a local Justice bent on squeezing more coin from the masses. Thus begins a rebellion of the common folk – loyal to the king, but not to those wealthy landowners who curtail their freedoms; the multitude finding cause against the powers that threaten their livelihoods. Set over sixteen days, Doom Painting roves across England as the revolt grows and swells and the rebels march to London to take their demands to the child-king Richard II. Out of the rebellion emerges its enigmatic and charismatic leader Wat Tyler, an opportunistic and mercurial rogue whose morality is birthed by the cause, and who shapes an identity for the English which has never been lost. A. K. Blakemore’s thrilling retelling of the Peasants’ Revolt renders it a definitive moment in British history. In the meeting of peasantry and nobility, new versions of England are born, and – for one bloody summer – the people of England seize control. Blakemore is a formidable talent. Few can evoke the past in such an urgent, deft way – and with Doom Painting she surely joins the first rank of historical fiction writers alongside Mantel and Tremain — Kiran Millwood Hargrave Exquisite and urgent, Doom Painting is so much more than historical fiction. It captures within its pages both the rebelliousness of the fourteenth century and the urgent spirit of our Age… An exceptional work that everyone should read, no matter whether they consider themselves more entranced by England’s past or ambitious for its future — Annie Garthwaite, author of The King’s Mother Truly astonishing. Blakemore has the rare gift of capturing the beating heart of events centuries past in all their complexity and unruliness, not for a second taking an eye off the tender, the human, the exquisite.