Press

What the critics say

Hugely enjoyable... Intelligent, classy, entertaining
- The Times

Seldom, since reading Jane Austen, have I so wanted to slip between the pages of a book and become one of its characters… She makes fiction as real as history and considerably more compelling
- Financial Times

Marvellous... Her descriptions are wonderful
- Sunday Times

Tillyard perfectly inhabits her period... Gradually the plot's threads tighten to reveal a perfectly sprung novel
- Daily Telegraph

Dazzling - I love this book. It's beautifully written, the characters are deeply involving and the historical settings are so right - in short, Tides of War is a triumph
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One of the most assured debuts in years...a modern novel that is the perfect answer to anyone who thinks the past is out of date
- Financial Times

Tides of War is elegantly written, with passages of verve and...poignancy
- Independent

A perfectly sprung novel of the sort that owes more to Hilary Mantel and David Mitchell than Patrick O'Brian or Bernard Cornwall
- Daily Telegraph

Love, betrayal, war and peace charge this powerful debut
- Woman & Home

Tillyard writes in fluid, largely understated prose and her descriptions are wonderful
- Sunday Times

Tillyard is a fluent and attractive chronicler of detail and some of her imaginative liberties are ingenious
- Sunday Telegraph

This saga of lives swept up in the Peninsular War recalls Georgette Heyer at her best...impossible to put down
- Saga

A thrilling romance brought to life with exquisite detail
- Prima

A prodigious talent able to combine meticulous research with novelistic devices...there is much to enjoy and admire
- Times Literary Supplement

Fluently written and impeccably researched
- The Lady

Gripping
- Easy Living

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion
- The Spectator

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed
- History Today

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind
- Literary Review

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity
- Oxford Times

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life
- i

Compelling
- Big Issue

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history
- Guardian

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time
- The Lady