Published in 2019
37 pages
Rozsa Gaston is a historical fiction author who writes books on women who reach for what they want out of life.
She is the author of Maid of Honour: Anne Boleyn at Margaret of Austria’s Court, Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction, Margaret of Austria, First Place Winner of the 2023 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction, the four-book Anne of Brittany Series: Anne and Charles; Anne and Louis, General Fiction Winner of the 2018 Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize; Anne and Louis: Rulers and Lovers; and Anne and Louis Forever Bound, First Place Winner of the 2022 Chaucer Book Award for Early Historical Fiction.
Other works include Sense of Touch, Marguerite and Gaston, The Least Foolish Woman in France, Paris Adieu, Black is Not a Color, Budapest Romance, Running from Love, and Dog Sitters.
Gaston studied European history at Yale and received her Master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia. She worked at Institutional Investor magazine, then as a columnist for The Westchester Guardian. She is currently working on a book on Anne Boleyn at Claude of France’s court. She lives in Bronxville, New York with her family.
Her motto? History matters.
What is this book about?
In a startling twist on the #MeToo movement, discover the secret torment of a future king of France caught between two royal sisters-in-law: one his worst nightmare, the other the deepest desire of his heart.
Anne de Beaujeu is France’s most powerful woman in 1491. Yet she can’t have the one thing she wants most: the love of Louis, Duke d’Orléans, future king of France. Why not? He’s already in love with another woman.
Anne of Brittany is the bride of Charles VIII, King of France and Louis’ brother-in-law through Jeanne of France, Louis’ wife. Forced at age fourteen to marry the hunchbacked sterile younger daughter of the spider king, Louis is caught in his web. His intent? To stamp out Louis’ line so that upon his death his lands and holdings revert to the French crown.
Trapped in a loveless marriage that produces no children, Louis turns his energies to becoming France’s top tennis player when he isn’t dallying with fair ladies of the court. But when he attracts the eye of his wife’s elder sister Anne de Beaujeu, regent of France in the young King Charles VIII’s minority, Louis vows he will not be caught in anyone’s web again.
To escape her attentions he flees over France’s border to Brittany. There, he allies himself with Anne of Brittany’s father, Duke Francis II, in the Breton struggle to fight off French domination in the Mad War of 1485-1488.
When Louis is taken captive in the French defeat of Brittany at the 1488 battle of Saint-Aubin, Anne de Beaujeu has him locked up. But capturing his body does not mean she has captured his heart.
Continue your discovery of France’s most riveting 15th century royal players with the Anne of Brittany Series, the three-part saga of a larger than life queen.
