Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles is the story of a woman born to rule a nation – and the glorious pageant of love and tragedy that followed in her wake. Mary's beauty inspired poetry – yet her birthright engendered hideous treachery and terrible, bloody murder.

This novel is Margaret George's magnificent recreation of the life of one of history's greatest legends. A woman accused of murdering her husband to marry her lover. A woman who became Queen six days after her birth in 1542 – only to be beheaded forty years later on the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I . . .