“Women, even queens, figure little in the annals of the past, and often it takes a novelist to rescue them from the shadows. Emma of Normandy may have commissioned a book about her life in 1040, but that account ignores her fifteen-year marriage to Athelred II, the king who brought her to England’s shores. In SHADOW ON THE CROWN, the first volume of a proposed trilogy about Emma, Patricia Bracewell rectifies this omission with consummate skill, imagining Emma’s first marriage with a verve and flair that assure the queen a lasting escape from obscurity.”