Buy Now, Pay Later
As low as
$3
/ mo
Learn more
- – 4-month term
- – No impact on credit to apply
- – Instant approval decision
- – Secure and straightforward checkout
Ready to go? Add this product to your cart and select a plan during checkout.
Payment plans are offered through our trusted finance partners Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, Apple Pay, and PayTomorrow. No-credit-needed leasing options through Acima may also be available at checkout.
Learn more about financing & leasing here.
Selected Option
Free shipping on this product
30-day returns
Learn more
FREE 30-day refund/replacement
To qualify for a full refund, items must be returned in their original, unused condition. If an item is returned in a used, damaged, or materially different state, you may be granted a partial refund.
To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.
View our full returns policy here.
Availability:
In Stock.
Arrives
Thursday, Jul 16
Recently Viewed
Format: Hardcover
Description
Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. Voted the top crime novel of all time by the UK Crime Writer’s Association, The Daughter of Time is Josephine Tey’s last and most successful book. Inspector Alan Grant is laid up in hospital with a spinal injury and he’s bored. Renowned for his ability to read a face, he passes the time looking at old portraits and one which particularly grabs his attention is of Richard III, the supposed arch villain who killed his own nephews, ‘the princes in the tower’ But Grant doesn’t accept the face in the portrait is the face of a villain so he sets out to investigate what really happened. An unusual premise for a crime novel perhaps, but nevertheless an extremely clever and engrossing one, brilliantly plotted and written with enormous charm and erudition. Read more
Publisher : Macmillan Collector's Library
Publication date : August 1, 2023
Edition : Pocket-Sized Edition
Language : English
Print length : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1529090350
ISBN-13 : 52
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 4.1 x 0.55 x 6.2 inches
Book 5 of 6 : Inspector Alan Grant
Frequently asked questions
If you place your order now, the estimated arrival date for this product is:
Thursday, Jul 16
Yes, absolutely! You may return this product for a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.
To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.
View our full returns policy here.
To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.
View our full returns policy here.
- Klarna Financing
- Affirm Pay in 4
- Affirm Financing
- Afterpay Financing
- PayTomorrow Financing
- Financing through Apple Pay
Learn more about financing & leasing here.
Top Amazon Reviews
Format: Paperback
osephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the fifth in a series of mysteries featuring inspector Alan Grant. The book is perhaps best known for the praise it received from mystery writer and critic Anthony Boucher, who called it one of the best mysteries of all time. That’s high praise to live up to, but the author began the book with higher aims than most mystery writers ever aspire to, and she made it clear in the first chapter that she wasn’t going to follow the traditional path to achieve them. For starters, Tey’s detective is bedridden throughout the novel, laid up on his back in a hospital due to injuries he sustained on a prior case. Grant is suffering from an acute case of boredom. Even the novels piled at his bedside, the latest works of the fictional best-selling authors Silas Weekley and Lavinia Fitch, don’t interest him. [quote] …you knew what to expect on the next page. Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then? Was everyone nowadays thirled to a formula? Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never talked about “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like. [end quote] This is another hint from the author that she won’t be presenting a run-of-the-mill mystery. To help alleviate his boredom, Grant’s friend Marta Hallard, an actress on the London stage, brings him a series of portraits–prints from London bookshops–showing faces and figures from the distant past. As a police inspector, Grant is a reader of faces. He prides himself on his ability to divine from the face a sense of a person’s character, their virtues, vices, weaknesses and habits of mind. One portrait in particular grabs his interest. He judges the man to be of strong integrity, good judgment, and solid character. The bottom of the print gives the subject’s name. Richard III, king of England from 1483 to 1485, one of the most reviled and vilified characters in all of history. This is the king who Sir Thomas More said murdered his young nephews–children who had been placed under his guardianship–in order to secure his claim to the throne. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard III is physically deformed, malevolent, and unconscionably evil. Grant shows the portrait to a fellow homicide detective, one of his co-workers at Scotland Yard, and asks if he were to encounter this person in a courtroom, would he expect to see him in the dock or on the bench. His fellow detective replies that the man has the calm and conscientious face of a judge, and he would expect to see him on the bench. Puzzled that two seasoned detectives have both come to the same reading of the King’s face, Grant decides to look further into the history of Richard III to figure out how a seemingly even-tempered and conscientious man could have conspired to murder his brother’s children in cold blood. Grant enlists the help of his actress friend Marta and an American researcher, Brent Carradine, working at the British Museum, to conduct the entire investigation from his hospital bed. At this point, we’re already far from the traditional formula of detective fiction. There will be no tours of crime scenes, no chases or tense confrontations. If the story is going to adhere to any sub-genre, it will have to be a procedural, whereby our detective slowly pieces together what made a good man snap and do something horrible. How did the once able and well-respected administrator from York degenerate into the despicable monster portrayed by More and Shakespeare? But even here, the book doesn’t go according to expectation. Grant impatiently (and correctly) dismisses the accounts of Shakespeare and Holinshed and Sir Thomas More as hearsay. Shakespeare got his story from Holinshed, who got it from More, who himself got it second-hand from a gossip several decades after the events transpired. The case they present, Grant notes, would not be admitted in court, because none of it was first hand, and all of the initial accounts came from unreliable sources who were not only hostile to Richard III, but had a vested interest in maligning him. Grant notes that most of what constitutes real history is not the narratives historians have composed, but the artifacts left behind by ordinary people who weren’t intending to write history at all. Grant looks for the kind of evidence that detectives look for in present-day cases, the kind that does hold up in court. Things as simple as receipts in a merchant’s account book can show where a person was on a given date, whether they had money, and in cases where purchased items were to be delivered to a third party, evidence of a relationship between the buyer and the recipient. Grant sets Brent Carradine back to the British Museum to dig up journals, letters, sermons, Parliamentary proceedings and more from the reigns of kings Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry VII. From these, he will piece together a compelling story of what actually happened to the two boys Richard is supposed to have murdered. The story he comes up with, and the evidence he marshals in its favor, is vastly more convincing than the tales of More and Shakespeare, which have for centuries been accepted as fact. This is another twist on the traditional detective formula. Rarely does a procedural, after so clearly identifying the perpetrator, go on to thoroughly exonerate him. Inspector Grant remarks several times throughout the story that a detective’s job is to understand how character, motive, psychology and circumstance guide behavior. The narrator notes that Grant’s friend Marta, the actress, has spent her career developing and refining an understanding of these same elements of human nature and experience. Brent Carradine, the researcher, remarks that his job is merely to uncover facts, not to supply commentary or interpretation (though he does some of that in his conversations with Grant). The tangible evidence that Carradine digs up allows Grant to establish a timeline of events, a cast of characters, and a series of relationships. His analysis of character and motive, based solely on evidence, allows him to fill in some holes about who likely did what, and when, and why. As far afield as we seem to have gone from the detective novel formula, Grant winds up doing in the end exactly what we expect a detective to do: through a combination of evidence gathering, logical deduction, and shrewd psychological insight, he pieces together a coherent and convincing story. So why does Boucher call this one of the best mysteries of all time? Probably because the author set herself the exceedingly difficult task of overturning a centuries-old conviction for one of history’s most infamous crimes, and then did an exceedingly good job in accomplishing her task. Keep in mind that the story of Richard III and his successor, Henry VII, was more than the standard intrigue of the king’s court. It was the brutal conclusion of thirty years of civil war that ended the Plantagenet dynasty and began 118 years of Tudor reign. The title, by the way, comes from an old proverb. Truth is the daughter of time. Which is to say, you can lie all you want, but eventually the truth will come out. Especially when a dogged and capable detective is on the case. This is one of those books that rewards you to the extent that you are willing to invest in it. If you just want to be entertained, you’ll find easier reading elsewhere. If you want to engage your mind and you’re willing to keep track of a large cast of historical characters and a great number of facts, you’ll like this. At the end of the book, Inspector Grant revisits the tale of Richard III as it’s written in a children’s history book. Grant, who is well attuned to the subtleties and complexities of human nature, is disgusted by the black-and-white tale of malevolence and evil, simple and unequivocal, universally accepted and completely wrong. The actual story with all its complexities is more difficult to digest, and for that reason is unlikely to ever supplant the false story that centuries of repetition have led people to stop questioning. The story that More and Shakespeare and the history books tell doesn’t hold up under interrogation, and Grant can’t hide his frustration with the supposedly learned historians who repeat it. “Historians should be compelled to take a course in psychology,” Grant observes, “before they are allowed to write.” Elsewhere he “wondered with what part of their brains historians reasoned. It was certainly by no process of reasoning known to ordinary mortals that they arrived at their conclusions.” In an earlier conversation with Marta Hallard, Grant remarks, “[H]istorians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow: with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.” Marta replies, “Perhaps when you are grubbing about with tattered records you haven’t time to learn about people. I don’t mean about the people in the records, but just about People. Flesh and blood. And how they react to circumstances.” The detective and the actress know that understanding the human element is essential to understanding any story about people. Brent Carrington puts in a final plug for the author when he says near the end, “A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history. He writes novels.” Or a woman who is interested in what makes people tick. She writes really good novels.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2019 by A. Diamond
Format: Paperback
Tonypandy is a town in South Wales where in 1910 an all-out labor riot took place. The newspapers and even local talk twisted and exaggerated the real story and the falsified account became the historical record. Alan Grant, the main character in Josephine Tey's "The "Daughter of Time," uses the word Tonypandy to describe faulty collective memory and in particular the popular history that tells us Richard III, whose name has come to mean villainy, was behind the 15th Century treachery and murder of Edward, Prince of Wales and Richard, Duke of York, the innocent golden-haired "Princes in the Tower." Grant, a Scotland Yard detective, is confined to a hospital bed after taking a nasty fall through a trap door while chasing a suspect. His friend Marta Hallard, a woman of the Theatre who has adopted Grant as a "spare escort," brings him flowers and books and suggests that instead of spending his days gazing at the ceiling in boredom, he become a bed-bound sleuth and a solve a mystery no one has ever been able to solve. "You could do some academic investigating," she says. "Finding a solution to an unsolved problem." Marta brings in a collection of pictures including a National Picture Gallery portrait of Richard III. Grant is captivated by the face of the king whose appearance doesn't match his portrayal as a monster, the destroyer of innocence. Grant sees a portrait of "Someone too conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in large design but anxious over details." And so the sleuthing begins. With the help of a young American researcher Brent Carradine, Grant digs into the historical record and finds documentation that paints Richard in a different light and points to other suspects in the princes' disappearance and presumed murder. During Grant's historical investigation, conducted while he's flat on his back, questions uncover new fact and facts begin to lead to truth and a different reality emerges, about Richard's deformity, about the death of the princes. It's a fascinating detective story that leads to a plausible conclusion about the real Richard and the name of the person behind the dual murder. Tey wants us to believe that what we read in the history books is not necessarily the way things happened. In convincing us she tells a riveting tale that unfolds through dialogue and banter. It's a fascinating book for its humor, its subject matter and for providing a conclusive solution to a mystery that has remained unsolved for more than four centuries. I believe I now know beyond a reasonable doubt who did the deed in The Tower. It feels good to finally have an answer, an answer that is different than you've been taught to believe. It's an answer without a hint of Tonypandy.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2011 by Kindle Customer
I first read The Daughter of Time long ago in my callow youth. I can't recall much about that first reading experience. I don't think it made much of an impression on me. I was not well-versed in English history and knew little of the Plantagenets, the Wars of the Roses, or the Tudors except what I had gleaned from Shakespeare, so there was very little background for my understanding of what Josephine Tey was doing with this novel. Since that long ago time, I have read dozens of books about that period of history, especially during the past couple of years when it has been something of an obsession of mine. The result is that I'm now much better equipped to follow Tey's plot and the reasoning of her protagonist Inspector Alan Grant. When I ran across a reference to her book recently, I was intrigued and decided it was time to read it again. I'm very glad that I did. The plot of the book is that Inspector Alan Grant has been seriously injured in a fall while chasing a miscreant and is now bedridden in the hospital with a broken leg and injuries to his spine. He must lie flat on his back. He is extremely bored. In order to divert him, his friends have been bringing him piles of books, but he can't get interested in them. One of his friends, an actress, knowing of his fascination with faces, brings him pictures of several historical figures who have mysteries attached to them. Most of the pictures do not pique his interest, but finally one of them does capture his imagination. It is a copy of the famous portrait of Richard III. Grant knows little about Richard III except what he remembers from Shakespeare which is, basically, that he killed his two nephews, the "Princes in the Tower," and that he died on Bosworth Field calling for a horse, but, as a student of faces and one whose career depends on being able to read faces, he begins to doubt, while studying the portrait of Richard, that this man was a murderer. He determines to conduct an investigation, four hundred years after the fact, to determine the accuracy of the charges against the man. His actress friend is delighted to have found something that will occupy Grant's mind and distract him from his predicament. What he needs is someone to do research for him and she happens to know just the person, a young American friend of hers who has an interest in history. Soon he is introduced to Brent Carradine and the two form an alliance and a working partnership in search of the truth. The two pore over history books and historical accounts of events of the late 15th century, but they soon discover that the most famous accounts of the period - that of Sir Thomas More, for example - were not contemporaneous but were actually written later, during the Tudor period. Since the Tudors were mortal enemies of Richard, can their accounts really be trusted? Grant, the consummate detective, doesn't think so. At length, the two investigators find that none of the reports that were actually written during the time of Richard's life refer to the death of the two princes and that there is evidence that the mother of the two remained in a friendly relationship with Richard and that her daughters continued to attend events at his court. None of that seems to be the action of a mother or a family who considered Richard to be the murderer of their sons and brothers. Grant and Carradine come to the conclusion that the princes were, in fact, still alive in the Tower throughout Richard's reign. So, what happened to them? Were they killed, and, if so, who killed them? Grant decides to follow the clues, as he would in any murder investigation, to try to uncover the culprit. The first question he asks is, who stood to gain from the princes' death? It wouldn't have been Richard, since after his brother Edward IV's death, Parliament had declared his children with Elizabeth Woodville as illegitimate because there had been an earlier, undissolved marriage with another woman. But there were other children, those of his brother George, who stood ahead of Richard in line to become king, and yet those children continued to live and thrive. After Richard's death, Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, rescinded all of that and made the Woodville children legitimate again because he wished to marry the oldest of them, the young Elizabeth. In short order, he also sent the children's mother (his mother-in-law) to a convent to live out her days. He also began to systematically rid the government and the aristocracy of the various Woodville relatives who had permeated it during the Yorkist reigns. No mention is made of the princes. Grant forms the theory that it was Henry who caused the princes to be killed since, by the order of succession, the older one would have been legitimately seen as king and would have provided a rallying point for his enemies. He sent the princes' mother to a convent so that she would be out of the way and have no means of protesting. He then purged other members of the extensive family. Tey, through Grant, lays out a very plausible case for her theory. She was not the only one who believed Richard innocent. Throughout the more than 450 years since Richard lived and died, there have been loyal groups in Britain who have continued to believe that he had been falsely maligned and to work to rehabilitate his reputation. Tey's book, which was published in 1951, influenced that movement and convinced many to join it. Such has been the far-reaching influence of this unique murder mystery. This was a work of fiction, of course, and yet it offered a fascinating journey through English history. It also gives us a study of a high-minded obsession, as well, as Grant becomes thoroughly convinced of the falsity of the charge against the accused and he is determined to prove him innocent and bring the guilty to justice. It is, after all, what he does. Some have noted the obvious relationship between this story and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Since the movie came a few years after the publication of the popular book, it is possible that Hitchcock was influenced by it. Certainly, the obsession of a wheelchair-bound James Stewart with the activities of his neighbors that he is able to view from his window is comparable to the obsession of the bedridden Grant with the idea of balancing the scales of history. Most likely we will never know with one hundred percent certainty what happened in the Tower of London long ago, but Josephine Tey through Alan Grant at least makes a strong argument for reasonable doubt about the guilt of Richard III and she makes us hungry to read more about that period. Yes, my obsession continues. Sixty-four years have passed since the publication of this book, which has been voted number one among the top 100 British murder mysteries, and archaeology has added to Richard's story. A few years ago, his remains were found near Bosworth Field where he had been hastily buried after the battle. After excavation and confirmation of his identity, those remains were reburied with full honors and great ceremony at Leicester Cathedral, with the service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and royalty in attendance. Truth may be the daughter of time, but irony is its son.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2015 by PlantBirdWoman
Inspector Alan Grant has a fascination with faces. Being that he is out of commission for a while and laid up in a hospital due to an untimely accident, he needs something to engage his brain to keep himself from utter boredom. His actress friend Marta suggests he investigate a mystery in the historical field. When he sees a portrait of Richard the Third, who allegedly murdered his two nephews, he becomes piqued with interest. He wants to know the history behind the Princes in the Tower murder scandal, and more importantly, why it took place. Luckily for him, he has all sort of visitors, and begins to pick their brains and theories about the King Richard scandal, but also gets them to drop off historical references to help him dig and unearth, try to deconstruct this incident, and try to discover what could have happened. Initially, I liked the idea of creating a unique way to present a mystery that Tey utilizes and that it is not your standard mystery. However, after this initial set up, I think that the technique wears thin after a while, and is not sustainable, and becomes a little tedious of a read over the course of two hundred plus pages. This is because Grant’s inquiry is a bit overblown with a preponderance of details of people, places, and dates thrown at the reader scatterbrained and all over the place. It felt like the research becomes repetitive and circular, and in these moments the novel loses quite a bit of steam. At one point, he enlists a visitor named Carridine, who is a researcher at the British Museum, to help him along his quest of understanding who Richard was and who the people around him were. But, the “investigation” seems a bit flimsy and superficial. This seems to kill of lot of the intrigue, especially in the latter parts of the novel. Still, l am interested in trying out other works by Josephine Tey, either in this series or outside this series, this one being my first read by her.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2023 by fra7299
This is a truly brilliant book. I first read it over 30 years ago, and I've re-read it several times since. It spurred my interest not only in Richard III but in the way that historical sources could be/are used to shape the narrative of events, both contemporaneously and in the future. Probably the two most striking examples of this in Western European history are Richard III and Joan of Arc. I just finished re-reading The Daughter of Time, this time after reading the other Alan Grant mysteries (which I had not read before). I am again struck by the extraordinary structure of this work. Tey used the historical sources of her time to not only challenge the dominant narrative but also to explore the biases--both obvious and unconscious--in historical writing. There's a moment, about 60% of the way in, where Alan reads a letter from a cousin in Scotland; in relating her own tale of false history that has become the dominant narrative, Laura notes how strongly people resist challenging a narrative with which they've become comfortable. It's easy to see that reluctance today when it comes to things like political or religious ideologies, but it's important to remember that historical narratives shape our view of the world without our conscious knowledge, and it is these unconscious biases that can be so debilitating to our ability to see the world from others' perspectives. Tey's gift for characterization is again present. It's important to remember that all of the "action" takes place in Grant's hospital room, where he is confined to bed. And yet the novel is never claustraphobic. Once again, Alan Grant is a thoughtful and sympathetic entry to this mystery, and it's lovely to interact again with Marta Hallard (if Tey had continued writing, would she and Grant have paired romantically, as well as platonically? it's clear, in To Love and Be Wise, that Grant has given the matter some thought, even if he isn't sure it would work out). But it's the characters that we won't see again--the Midget and the Amazon, the matron, the surgeon, and the adorable Brent Carradine, who becomes Grant's enthusiastic partner--and the characters that emerge from Grant and Carradine's research and discussions--Richard, Morton, Henry VII, Elizabeth Woodville--who come so delightfully alive and make the reader forget that we've never left Grant's hospital room. There's a reason that the British Crime Writers' Association named this the greatest mystery of all time. It is beautifully constructed, argues well the evidence known at the time, brings to life individuals who died over 450 years before, but doesn't neglect the "side" characters who are not critical to the mystery but do permit Tey to explore certain themes.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2015 by Cara
Format: Paperback
I first read "The Daughter of Time" about 25 years ago, and it made a deep impression on me. I was too busy at the time to pursue the substance matter further, but recently, after re-reading it again, I started digging deeper, checking history books and encyclopedias, and historical fiction dealing with the period and the character (in both senses of the word) or Richard III. Though the author's logical reasoning is flawed in places, and though she skips some fundamental facts (she barely mentions Buckingham's rebellion and thus his possible hand in the fate of the Princes in the Tower), her book is the best possible introduction (short - about 200 pages - compared to most books of this kind, easy reading, engaging characters, a touch of humor) to the search for the truth about Richard III. Indeed history is written by the victors, and Henry Tudor certainly did his best to blacken his fallen enemy's memory, from having Titulus Regius (the Act of Parliament confirming Richard's right to the succession) repealed and burned without being read (thank heavens a copy did survive) to having his pet historians rewrite the history of his times to - and this is the worst - killing off all other possible claimants to the throne, including Richard's bastard son (his legitimate son having pre-deceased him). Josephine Tey makes that vividly clear, and at the same time fun (though by no means funny) and entertaining. I was totally convinced, not so much by her earnestness as by the logic (despite a couple of lapses) of her arguments. I was pleased to see that she inspired many writers of both fiction and non-fiction to dwell deeper into history and apply logic and reason to counter propaganda and disinformation. I am however dismayed to see that even after 400 years of one author after another trying to rehabilitate Richard III's memory, and the efforts of the Ricardian Society, still so many people subscribe to the "traditionalist" view and that history books and encyclopedias still maintain the Tudor account of event, and there still lie in Westminster a coffin with two children's skeletons with a plaque saying those are Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, murdered by their uncle. I wonder why the people in charge refuse to disinter the bones for carbon dating and DNA tests? Be it as it may, this book is highly recommended. And if you like it, you may, like me, go on and explore further about this historical, real-life mystery.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2006 by Kisminette
So, this probably is obvious to a lot of people, but it wasn't to me: THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is not the place to start if you don't know anything at all about the Wars of the Roses. Partly because Tey tosses a lot of names and events at the reader, and if you don't already know who Edward IV is, or what happened at the Battle of Bosworth, you'll find yourself checking Wikipedia a lot and sort of scrambling to understand. THE DAUGHTER OF TIME has a really zippy pace, the writing is bright and lively, so if you've got a great big blank spot in your education under the heading "Wars of the Roses," Tey is not the person to provide much in the way of painstaking detail. I also think that THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is designed, like so many mysteries, to surprise the reader. If you open up the pages believing that Richard III is an evil murderer of children, woah, would you be shocked to have evidence presented bit by little bit to show that actually, he is most likely innocent of that crime and a wonderful, upstanding individual besides. Since I had hardly any notion of who the Princes in the Tower were, nor any ill opinion of Richard III, I felt no surprise. THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is a really fun book, even though I had to keep my Wikipedia open to follow along. As in so many mysteries, our protagonist is a sleuth. A police inspector, Alan Grant, confined to bedrest after a bad accident. He investigates Richard III to pass the time, because a centuries-old cold case is the only kind he can take on from his hospital room, and Tey lays out the historical evidence the same way that Agatha Christie distributes clues. There are twists and turns, unexpected reversals. It's really satisfying to reach the last page and feel like untruths have been cleared away, answers found, a man's reputation vindicated. I'm interested in reading more about the Wars of the Roses now, which I feel is a little backwards. Still, good read.
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2013 by Kindle Customer
I have always enjoyed reading about the lives of royalty, especially the royalty of the British Isles. The scandalous wagging of tongues as people who are born into the bosom of leading a country has always been salacious to the "common folk". With he discovery of Richard III's body under a parking lot in England, the dark story of his brief reign, forever associated with the mysterious disappearance of the Two Princes in the Tower, once again came to the forefront of media gossip. Shakespeare created the pentultimate villain in his play about Richard, the hunchback, evil, scheming uncle of the the Princes, his nephews from his much-beloved brother Edward. As their designated guardian, Richard was supposed to lead the country until they came of age, but instead they disappeared from history amid whispers that they were killed by their uncle in his lust for the Throne of England. Thus, dear readers, the story written by Josephine Tey will once again transport you to the England of yore, when a King died in a battle and was forever stamped into history as the original Wicked Uncle. Plot As mentioned in the summary, The Daughter of Time centers around a bedridden Scotland Yard Inspector, Alan Grant, who is recovering after breaking his leg due to falling down a trap door. He is a slightly cantankerous character, and being forced to remain in bed in hospital while he is an invalid, he desperately needs some sort of diversion from staring at the cracks in the ceiling. Before long, the story introduces Mr. Grant's friends and their attempts in brightening his spirits. Most have brought him books that he pointedly ignores, finding them to be exceedingly dull. Fear not, however; soon Ms. Tey brings into the narrative a seemingly innocuous bunch of "faces"; pictures of various people (both modern and historical), and suddenly The Daughter of Time draws you into a cleverly crafted tale about an Inspector who wants to know the truth about a man who is universally identified as a monster. Narrative Style Ms. Tey has crafted a tale that, though fiction, does an amazing job at discussing the history of England without making you yearn for a drunken respite. The story is written in such a way that you truly want Mr. Grant to explore even deeper into the mystery surrounding Richard III, especially how he came to be the villain in a Shakespeare play. In the novel, it is a picture of a painting of Richard that begins his inquiry into the truth about his tale. Ms. Tey tells a tale that gradually follows Mr. Grant's investigation, from his first study of the picture of Richard to his pleas for more knowledge. In between Mr. Grant's interior dialogue, as well as conversations with the various people who aid him in his inquiry while he is bedridden, Ms. Tey sometimes journeys back to Richard's time, writing from the perspective of members of his family. Sometimes these brief interludes are a bit odd, but they do help to flesh out the life of Richard. In terms of the narrative, most of it is told from the viewpoint of the protagonist, Mr. Grant. Ms. Tey masterfully introduces more and more snippets of clues into the story, starting with the tale that defines the reign of Richard: the disappearance of his nephews, the two Princes who were held in Tower of England after their father, Edward IV, died. Rather than villainizing Richard further, the story questions why Richard is so reviled, and from that simple play in devil's advocacy more clues, introduced as various papers and books that Mr. Grant references in the story, are revealed that go beyond the why of his hatred, and instead questions who. Who is Richard III? Why did a man who was unquestionably loyal to his much-beloved brother Edward IV suddenly covet the throne and abandon his promise to take care of his nephews? If you would like to read a story that is like, but not entirely unlike, a modern detective mystery, then the writing style of Ms. Tey will appeal to you. Her turns of phrase and the dialogue between the characters very easily draws you in, even with the sometimes awkward juxtaposition of the historical first-person narration from members of Richard's family. To give any further detail would detract from the story, so I will not give explicit examples of her writing style. But believe me, if you enjoy a good mystery, especially one that discusses a dark tale from the past, this book is for you. Be warned! I have gone to bed and decided to read a bit only to find myself saying "one more chapter" as the clock moves past the 2AM mark! To say that this book is a page-turner is an understatement. Overall If you would like a book that weaves a mystery about a former King of England, masterfully introducing new clues as the protagonist discovers that maybe, just maybe, everything that we know about the evil Richard III is not true, then I recommend that you acquire a copy of The Daughter of Time today. You will gleefully turn each page, eagerly devouring the story to find out just what Mr. Grant discovers. Ms. Tey truly does draw you in and make you feel as though you are part of her fictional world, that you are a friend of Mr. Grant's who is visiting him in hospital while he recovers from his injury. In short, if you ever wanted to know more about Richard III, the man who famously cried "My kingdom for a horse!" at the Battle of Bosworth, a man who ended up ignominiously buried under a parking lot in England, reviled by his fellow countrymen, then this is a book for you. While this book is definitely fiction, there are many facts about the life of the king, which may spur you to research him on your own. It is a shame that it took over 400 years for someone to grant humanity to a man who is universally recognized as a villain; but Ms. Tey is here to help you look at him in a different light, all without having to wade through history books at your local library. A definite must-have for any mystery enthusiast!
...
show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2013 by Stacy L