Author Talk: Lauren Chater - The Beauties & The Winter Dress

Join best selling author Lauren Chater as she talks about her new book The Beauties and her previous best seller The Winter Dress , and what it's like to write historical fiction.

The Beauties

An incomparable beauty. A promise to a king. A portrait that can never be completed.

When Emilia Lennox loses everything after her husband’s lands and title are confiscated, her beauty is her best bargaining chip with the only man who can restore their fortunes: King Charles II himself. But the king’s favour comes at a price. He will pardon Emilia’s husband only if she agrees to be his mistress. Torn, Emilia comes up with a condition of her own: she will consent, but not until her portrait hangs among the famed Windsor Beauties, a series commissioned by the Duchess of York to showcase the fairest women in the royal retinue

This seductive story of rivalry, artistic passion and a woman bold enough to wield her beauty as a weapon.

The Winter Dress

Two women separated by centuries but connected by one beautiful silk dress. A captivating novel based on a real-life shipwreck discovered off Texel Island.
The brightness of silk in that dull room was like the heavens parting after a storm ... She saw herself remade, no longer a poor laundress but a woman with means.
Jo Baaker, a textiles historian and Dutch expat is drawn back to the island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a 17th-century silk dress. Retrieved by local divers from a sunken shipwreck, the dress offers tantalising clues about the way people lived and died during Holland's famous Golden Age.

Copies of the books will be available for purchase and be signed by the author.

Lauren Chater is the author of the historical novels The Lace Weaver, Gulliver's Wife, The Winter Dress and The Beauties. In 2018 she was awarded a grant by the Neilma Sidney Literary Fund, and The Winter Dress was longlisted for the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize

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