A respectable trade - Phillipa Gregory

A Respectable Trade is a book I picked up on Amazon as part of a gift voucher birthday present. At only £1.99 new, it was a great bargain as it retails around the £8 mark normally. I was surprised to find that this book was actually written around 1996 and has been made into a BBC serial, as I've never heard anything about it. If you've heard of Philippa Gregory, it's probably because of her book The Other Boleyn Girl, which has fairly recently been made into a film starring Scarlett Johanssen and Natalie Portman. This in turn has created a wave of popularity for all her books - and that's how I discovered them too. Gregory is best known ...  Read the complete review

I love historical novels, and Phillippa Gregory is probably one of my favourite historical authors. Her most well known works deal with the Tudor and Elizabethan Court, and excellent though these works are, they contain characters I am already familiar with, and although her style of writing is gripping, it doesn't mask the fact that I know Anne Boleyn's in for a beheading. So, when I came across a respectable trade, I was refreshed to see that there were no well-known characters in the plot. No kings, no queens, and no whores with three nipples. Instead this is a tale of the slave trade, told primarily from the point of view of Frances Scott. When ...  Read the complete review