Toby Clements Books in Order

For the full Wars of the Roses story: Winter Pilgrims → Broken Faith → Divided Souls → Kingdom Come
If you want Toby Clements at his funniest: The Asti Spumante Code → The No. 2 Global Detective
If you want a self-contained crime spoof: The No. 2 Global Detective
If you want TV and motoring satire: Driving Us Insane

Toby Clements did not come to fiction out of nowhere. Before he became a novelist, he spent years as a journalist and editor on the literary desk of the Daily Telegraph, and he has also reviewed fiction for the TLS. That time around books mattered. It gave him a sharp sense of how genres work, where they creak, and what keeps a reader moving on.

History got to him early.

He has said his first attempt at historical fiction came when he was ten and trying to write about Harold Godwinson at Hastings. Faced with the problem of how to tell the story, he did what many schoolchildren do, closed the exercise book and forgot about it. The impulse stayed, though. A school trip to Tewkesbury Abbey left him obsessed with the Wars of the Roses, an obsession that would eventually turn into a whole body of work.

Before the medieval battles came the jokes. Clements wrote parodies like The Asti Spumante Code and The No. 2 Global Detective, books that show how closely he had read thrillers and crime fiction. They are playful, full of genre knowledge, and built by someone who enjoys both the machinery of a plot and the pleasure of taking that machinery apart.

His big turn as a historical novelist came with Winter Pilgrims, the first Kingmaker book. It was shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Debut Crown Award, and it led to Broken Faith, Divided Souls, and Kingdom Come. Those novels do not stay up in the towers with kings and earls for long. Instead, they follow ordinary people trying to survive while the country tears itself apart.

That choice tells you a lot about him as a writer.

Clements has said that, over time, he became less interested in the high and mighty than in the common people of the fifteenth century, how they lived, loved, fought, healed, and died. You can feel that in his fiction. His medieval world is muddy, hungry, frightened, resourceful, and often painfully physical. Readers who like his work tend to like that balance, big history on the one hand, and the hard daily business of staying alive on the other.

He does not seem to research from a polite distance, either. For the Kingmaker books he read widely, spent time at re-enactment fairs, learned to use a longbow and a poll axe, and even tried practical skills like making fire with flint and steel. More recently he returned to the fifteenth century in A Good Deliverance, a novel about Sir Thomas Malory, prison, memory, and the making of Le Morte Darthur. The scale is large, but the pressure is intimate.

Toby Clements lives in London with his wife and three children. He has continued to write historical fiction, and his work as a reviewer and editor still feels close to the surface of what he does. Whether he is writing parody or war-torn history, the thread is the same: he likes stories with momentum, sharp observation, and characters under strain. He wants the past to feel inhabited, not embalmed.