> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 19 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780140279894
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $27.99

The Ringed Castle

The Lymond Chronicles Book Five




The fifth book in an enthralling series about the legendary Scottish warrior, Lymond - reissued with a brand new package

Sixteen-year-old Philippa Somerville has left Constantinople intact. Returning to England as wife in name only to Francis Crawford of Lymond, she wastes no time in seeking the truth about her new spouse, even as she finds herself navigating the paranoid court of Queen Mary.

Lymond, meanwhile, arrives in Moscow to assist its young Tsar Ivan to create a fledgling Russian army. But when he is tasked to visit London as Ivan's envoy his path is bound to cross that of the wife he has sworn to divorce.

Yet neither Lymond nor Philippa, caught up in their own scheming, can quite see the vast conspiracy enshrouding them . . .

  • Published: 19 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780140279894
  • Imprint: Michael Joseph
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

Dorothy Dunnett

Dorothy Dunnett was born in 1923 in Fife, Scotland. She attended James Gillespie's High School for Girls where she was Intermediate Dux and specialised in art, leading to an early career as a professional portrait painter. At the same time she became an executive officer in the British Civil Service working first in Edinburgh and then moving to Glasgow. At her husband's suggestion, she began writing fiction in her late thirties and has now published 22 novels. Her first book, the bestseller Game of Kings was published in 1961 and was the first of the six-part Lymond series, set in the 16th century. She has since written a series of seven modern mystery novels featuring a yachtsman called Johnson, a single 11th century novel about Macbeth, King Hereafter, and a further series of historical novels called The House of Niccolo, set in the 15th century. The eighth and last book in this series is about to be published and will be celebrated later this year by international gatherings of readers in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, the latest of many formal and informal meetings of readers. All her novels have been published on both sides of the Atlantic and have been translated into many European languages. In 1984, readers of Dunnett's work in North America launched a regular private correspondence magazine which is now worldwide and published quarterly with subscribers in Australia and New Zealand. In recent years this has expanded to the Internet and is one of many sites which now discuss her work.

Also by Dorothy Dunnett

See all

Praise for The Ringed Castle

She is a brilliant story teller, The Lymond Chronicles will keep you reading late into the night, desperate to know the fate of the characters you have come to care deeply about.

The Times Literary Supplement

Melodrama of the most magnificent kind

The Guardian

Praise for Dorothy Dunnett

-

A storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about pace, suspense and imaginative invention

New York Times

Marvellous, breathtaking

The Times

One of the greatest tale-spinners since Dumas

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A masterpiece of historical fiction

Washington Post

Lashings of excitement, colour and subtlety

The Times

Vivid, engaging, densely plotted - are almost certainly destined to be counted among the classics of popular fiction

New York Times