The Last English King, by Julian Rathbone (Abacus, £6.99 in UK)

The king in question is Harold, the Saxon ruler killed at Hastings in 1066 - since when the ruling dynasties in England have been Norman-French, Angevin-French, Welsh (the Tudors), Scottish (the Stuarts) and German (the Hanoverians). This novel aims to bring history alive rather in the manner of Robert Graves's I Claudius, and it makes no attempt whatever at pastiche medieval speech - at one stage, Harold calls Duke William of Normandy a "wily bugger", and words like "mayhem" are introduced freely. It was a brutal time, so Julian Rathbone does not have to invent scenes of savagery and sex when they were everyday matters. A lively read in its rather raw way, and I half-suspect that one of these days we shall see it on the film or TV screen.