The Wars of the Roses turned England upside down. Between 1455 and 1485 four kings lost their thrones, more than forty noblemen lost their lives, and thousands of the men who followed them met violent deaths. Yet almost nothing is known about the people who lived through this bloody conflict, whether king or noble, landowner or peasant. Almost nothing, but not quite.

As they made their way in a disintegrating world, a Norfolk family called the Pastons were writing letters - about politics, business, shopping, love - and about each other. Extraordinarily, these letters have survived; they form the earliest great collection of private correspondence in the English language. Five hundred years on, the Pastons' voices still have the immediacy of an overheard conversation. Little wonder, then, that, when they were first published in the eighteenth century, the Paston Letters became a runaway bestseller.

Drawing on these remarkable letters, Blood & Roses is an intimate and compelling family biography which traces the Pastons' story across three generations, exploring their experiences of birth, marriage and death, and the realities of their daily lives. Helen Castor unravels the turbulent backdrop of civil war between York and Lancaster to produce a vivid evocation of the medieval world.

Blood & Roses tells the dramatic, moving and intensely human story of how one family survived one of the most tempestuous periods in English history.

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