I find Penman's prose difficult to read - it's solid enough, to the point of stodginess. In all other regards, she is astonishing, taking events that are plagued by the arbitrary, the disastrous, the astonishingly foolish, the utterly unnecessary and more than a few bolts from the blue, and builds her novel around them with amazing skill. The fictional characters she creates out of historical personalities live and breathe, such that their responses to the unpredictable, and their own self-inflicted disasters, flow smoothly and naturally. She somehow weaves the book through a history that is often mistfying and even repetitive without the pace ever flagging or becoming unmoored. Beginning with the nation-breaking disaster of the White Ship and all the subsequent bad decisions, unhappy marriages, cheerful arrogance and entitlement, grim determination, rage and betrayal and widespread suffering and destruction, the narrative is epic, sweeping and spellbinding.