The Bookseller – Rights – Weidenfeld & Nicolson lands two books to complete Windsor trilogy from Larman

Weidenfeld & Nicolson has landed a two-book deal with Alexander Larman, with The Windsors at War: The Nazi Threat to the Crown and Power and Glory: The Era of Elizabeth.

Publishing director Ed Lake acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Ed Johnson at Johnson & Alcock. The Windsors at War will be published on 9th March 2023 with Power and Glory following in spring 2024.

The books will complete a Windsor trilogy from the author, with the first installment — The Crown in Crisis — published by W&N in 2020. The Windsors at War will “answer a simple question: how did this squabbling, dysfunctional family manage to put their difference aside and unite to help win the greatest conflict of their lifetimes?” It will cover the bombing of Buckingham Palace in May 1940, the Duke of Windsor’s visit to Germany and the death of the Duke of Kent.

Power and Glory is a “panoramic and epic” royal history. Opening on the fallout from the Duke of Windsor’s “wartime treachery”, Larman examines an era where “old certainties have been replaced by the rise of a new, uncertain world, and where love, tragedy and modernity battle for supremacy” before ending with the Coronation of Elizabeth II

Lake said: “Alexander Larman is the very model of the journalist-historian, a formidable researcher with a sparkling voice and the most remarkable nose for a story. The Windsors at War might as well be a buried munitions cache, so packed is it with explosive revelations. And in Power and Glory the early Elizabethan era will finally get the assessment it cries out for. We are thrilled to be bringing Larman’s royal trilogy to its grand, if not always stately, finale.”

Larman added: “As soon as I finished writing The Crown in Crisis, I knew that the story of the royal family over the period between the abdication crisis and the coronation of Elizabeth II was a rich and fascinating one. I am thrilled to be telling it in my next two books, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory I expected to find pageantry and patriotism in my research: instead, I have unearthed a fascinating psychodrama about the most famous family in Britain, in all its complex and flawed majesty . It will, I hope, appeal to royalists and republicans alike.”