Elizabeth I (Penguin Monarchs)

Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her first book, Blood & Roses , a biography of the fifteenth-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her second book, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth , was made into a BBC2 TV series, and selected as one of the books of the year for 2010 in the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times, Independent , Financial Times and BBC History Magazine . Her most recent book, Joan of Arc , was dubbed 'a triumph of history' ( Guardian ).