Sharon Kay Penman Books in Order

If you want medieval Wales and its princes: Here be Dragons → Falls the Shadow → The Reckoning
If you're curious about Henry II and Eleanor: When Christ and His Saints Slept → Time and Chance → Devil's Brood
If you want Richard the Lionheart's arc: Lionheart → A King's Ransom
If you enjoy historical mysteries: The Queen's Man → Cruel as the Grave → Dragon's Lair → Prince of Darkness
If you prefer a single sweeping standalone: The Sunne in Splendour → The Land Beyond the Sea

Sharon Kay Penman was born in New York City in 1945 and grew up in New Jersey, in and around Atlantic City. She studied history at the University of Texas at Austin, then went on to earn a law degree from Rutgers School of Law, expecting to build a steady career in tax and corporate work.

Writing, though, was already the thing tugging at her sleeves. While still a student she began a long novel about Richard III and the Wars of the Roses. After four years of research and drafting, the only copy of the manuscript was stolen from her car. She could not face starting over for more than five years.

Eventually she did begin again, page by page, while working full‑time as a lawyer. The result, published in 1982 as The Sunne in Splendour, reimagined Richard III's life from childhood to Bosworth. Penman later joked that she viewed those years in law as penance, but they also gave her an eye for documents, loopholes, and the fine print of power.

Once the first book was out, she turned north and west. Penman moved to Wales for stretches of time, walking castle ruins, battlefields, and mountain passes as she researched what became the Welsh Princes trilogy: Here be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning. Those novels braid together the stories of Llewelyn the Great, Joanna, Simon de Montfort, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd, and the English kings who wanted Wales subdued.

Her other major sequence, often called the Plantagenet or Angevin novels, centers on Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their turbulent children. In When Christ and His Saints Slept, Time and Chance, Devil's Brood, Lionheart, and A King's Ransom, she follows the family from the civil war between Empress Maude and Stephen through the Becket crisis, the rebellion of Henry's sons, the Third Crusade, and Richard I's long captivity.

Alongside these big epics, Penman wrote four medieval mysteries featuring Justin de Quincy: The Queen's Man, Cruel as the Grave, Dragon's Lair, and Prince of Darkness. Set in the 1190s, they send an illegitimate but well‑educated young man into the service of Eleanor of Aquitaine, mixing missing letters, murder investigations, and the street life of London, Winchester, Paris, and the Welsh Marches.

Readers often talk about the way her books make the Middle Ages feel solid underfoot. Penman was known for visiting the places she wrote about whenever she could and for using real castles, churches, and roads as the backbone of her scenes. She liked to say that historical novelists owe their readers the truth about known facts, even while they 'fill in the blanks' with imagination.

In later years she returned to the world of the Crusader states in The Land Beyond the Sea, which traces the short, difficult reign of Baldwin IV and the struggle to hold the kingdom of Jerusalem against Saladin. By then her novels were regular visitors to bestseller lists, and her mysteries had earned both an Edgar Award nomination and a career‑achievement honor for historical crime fiction.

Penman spent most of her life in New Jersey, surrounded by dogs, research books, and an ever‑growing file of medieval mishaps and curiosities. She traveled often to England, France, and Wales, and she enjoyed talking with readers who had followed her characters across thousands of pages.

She died in January 2021, at the age of seventy‑five. The body of work she left behind reads like a long, interlocking tapestry of Britain's and Outremer's past, full of flawed rulers, stubborn rebels, sharp‑witted queens, and the ordinary people forced to live in the shadow of their decisions.