Laura Purcell Books In Order

Publication Order of Georgian Queens Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Laura Purcell is a bestselling horror, paranormal and historical fiction author best known for the “Hanoverian” series of novels.

She is a former bookseller who decided to get into fiction writing when she published “Queen of Bedlam,” the debut novel of her series in 2014. The series of historical novels did so well that she has gone on to pen more than eight titles over the years.

Purcell is the winner of the 2018 WHSmith Thumping Award and was also shortlisted for the Best Original Paperback Edgar Award and the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award. Over the years, her short stories have been published in the likes of “The Haunting Season” and the “Sunday Times” among many other places.
In recent times, she worked in the Realm podcast Roanoke Falls as lead writer, working with executive producers Sandy King Carpenter and John Carpenter.

Over the years, Laura Purcell had a very diverse taste in genres but held a particular love for thrillers, well written historical sagas and the Classics. As such, she doesn’t really have any favorite novel even though she has reread classics such as “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Wuthering Heights” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

She also has an obsession with the works of Daphne Du Maurier. The first novel she remembers loving was Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty” that she found in her mother’s library given that she loved riding and anything about horses at the time.

Purcell also read a lot of Point Romance, Horror and Goosebumps in her childhood years, before she got into literary fiction in her teenage years.
Jane Austen has always been a huge inspiration and it was the love for her novels that got her started in a fiction writing career. Up until now, she loves to sneak in a reference or line of Jane Austen in every novel she writes.

It was also in her teenage years that she discovered the Thomas Hardy and Bronte sisters and the novels have had a significant impact on her emotional landscape to this day.

During her childhood, Laura Purcell used to jot down stories here and there. But it was not until she was a teenager and read Austen that she tried to write regency works in the same vein.

She was a very early starter as she was only fourteen years old at the time. She wrote many works over this period as she wrote manuscript after manuscript that she would then abandon.

But it would take several years more before she published Queen of Bedlam, her debut novel in 2014 as a 29 year old. It was quite an achievement for her as she had started the research for the novel in 2009 and it took almost five years before she published it.

As for the inspiration of the novel, she has asserted that it has come from the things she sees and reads in her daily life. She has also been influenced by authors such as Daphne Du Maurier, Susan Hill, Sarah Water and Shirley Jackson.

Laura Purcell loves to write historical fiction as her imagination tends to live in the past. Even though she loves reading novels set in the modern world, she just finds herself bored to tears trying to make plotlines for the same era.
She does think that it has to do with the fact that she was so into the classics when she was in her teens. Since most were from a past era, her brain has come to equate good stories with historical fiction.
Purcell is a huge lover of the Georgian and Regency eras and usually sets most of her historical fiction in these periods.

She would go on to switch genres when she read a few gothic stories and had an idea for a plot that she ran past a few friends.

With her friends giving the idea a thumbs up she took a break from the Regency period and started writing what would become “The Silent Companions.” It went on to become a huge success that won a book deal and she has never looked back since.

“Queen of Bedlam” by Laura Purcell is the story of a sickly romantic princess named Sophia and her sister Roya who longs for children and marriage. The author moves from the perspectives of Sophia, Royal and Queen Charlotte, as she depicts lives strained by a tedious and rigid regime.
The girls line up for parades and dread tedious and long concerts and the Queen botanizes at Kew. The palaces they live in are surprisingly uncomfortable and cold and the court while well drawn seems claustrophobic.

As expected, Royal schemes to find love soon followed by Sophia with their quests resulting in suspenseful and unexpected consequences. Surprisingly, the small courts in Germany seem to have so much life and luxury as compared to the larger courts of austere England.

While the author writes in clear style and prose there are some occasional modern colloquialism and evidence that some royal sources may have been consulted.
Overall, this work is an assured fiction work of history that evokes in a poignant manner how the lives of Georgian era women are affected by the times and a crisis in the United Kingdom.

Laura Purcell’s novel “Mistress of the Court” is a compelling novel that tells the stories of former Princes and now Queen of Wales Caroline and Henrietta Howard, her devoted servant.

As a sixteen year old, Henrieta was left an orphan who had to take care of her younger siblings. She was helped by the Countess and Earl of Suffolk, her distant relatives, for a time. Eventually, she married one of their sons who turned out to be a brutal, ill tempered, extravagant, drunken and obstinate man.
Her husband’s drinking forced her to move out of her home and into squalid conditions as her small fortune was held in a trust for her children. She hatches a plan to travel to Hanover in Germany to ingratiate herself to the heir apparent to Queen Anne of Britain, the Elector George Ludwig.

But she cannot travel with her youngest son Henry who stays behind with her brother. Charles follows her along as he wants to get away from his creditors. Her plan worked and she became one of the servants of the wife of George II, alongside Charles who now works for the future king.