The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (2006, Abridged, Compact Disc)

Philippa Gregory’s historical series about the rise and fall of Tudor England’s Boleyn family comes to a powerful conclusion with this intense, moving novel. Henry VIII is a bloated, ill, near-paranoid megalomaniac who sees treason everywhere and changes religious and civil law at whim to combat it. The three women doomed to try to please him are Anne of Cleaves, his fourth wife, Catherine Howard, his fifth, and Jane Boleyn, (Lady Rochford) who presides over the Queen’s Privy Chamber.

These are ugly times, and Gregory’s prose pulls no punches. Her Henry will make listeners’ skin crawl. Her Duke of Norfolk, head of the Howard-Boleyn family, is as malevolent as Shakespeare's Iago. All three narrators make Gregory’s main characters vibrant in life and sympathetic as they face the possibility of their death. In the unabridged edition, Davina Porter brings humanity and depth to the double-dealing, perverse Lady Rochford. Charlotte Parry is charming as the insipid but beautiful 15 year-old Catherine, and her portrayal allows the young queen to rise to tragic heights. As Henry’s most misunderstood wife, Anne of Cleaves, an outsider whose hesitant English and cultural differences condemn yet save her, Bianca Amato (the only one of the three narrators to appear in both the abridged and unabridged editions) gives a complex, beautifully articulated, memorable performance.