The Forest. Edward Rutherfurd. 2000.

Cradled in a vast bowl scooped from England’s southern coast, the New Forest is bordered to its west by the River Avon, and to its east by the port of Southampton. In the heart of the Forest itself, some one hundred thousand acres of woodland and Heath sweep down to the Solent and the Islenof Wight, overlooking the English Channel just beyond.

The New Forest has always been a mysterious almost mythical place. Witchcraft, smuggling, poaching and treachery run through the bloodlines of the families who people Rutherfurd’s epic story. There are well-born ladies and lowly woodsmen, sailors and Cistercian monks. There is the merchant Totton family from the port of Lymington and the noble Lisles and Penruddocks of Moyes Court. There are the feuds, wars, loyalties and passions of generations - which reach their climax in a crime which shatters the decorous society of Jane Austen’s Bath.

Great deeds and small, nobility and peasantry. From the cruel forest laws of the Normans and their passion for hunting to the founding of Beaulieu Abbey by capricious King John, from the very real dangers of the Spanish Armada to the elegance of Georgian Lymington, from the herds of wild deer and horses which have roamed free since time immemorial to the mighty oaks which gave Nelson his navy, Rutherfurd has captured the essence of this ancient domain. Forest and sea: there is no more perfect English heartland.