She became Queen of Scots only six days after her birth in 1542. At sixteen she was the Queen of France. By her eighteenth birthday, Mary had been married, widowed, had lost one throne and been named by the Pope for another. Months later she defied her cousin Elizabeth I and set sail to take her place as the Catholic queen of a newly Protestant Scotland, where she would be hailed as a saint, denounced as a whore, accused of murdering her husband in order to marry her lover, and ultimately forced to flee. She was only twenty-five years old when she left Scotland for the imagined sanctuary of her cousin's England, there to remain captive for twenty years until she was beheaded 'like a criminal' in 1587.

In Margaret George's magnificent new novel, her mesmerising blend of history and story-telling take us from the glittering French court where Mary spent her youth, to the bloodstained Scotland where she reigned as Queen and finally to the cold English palaces where she ended her days. MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE ISLES brings to life the woman whose beauty inspired poetry, whose spirit attracted both devotion and hatred, and whose birthright generated glorious dreams, hideous treachery and bloody murder.

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