WINNER OF THE 2023 PARLIAMENTARY BOOK AWARDS NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK Power is shifting. Queen Elizabeth I is dying, James waiting to become King. Everywhere, there is opportunity to ascend. But who will thrive, and who will fail, under the new King? Will it be the scholar Francis Bacon, whose brilliant mind is the envy of the royal court? Or his hated rival the attorney Edward Coke, already acclaimed as the greatest lawyer of his generation? The Winding Stair tells the gripping story of these two founders of our modern world and their battle for power, pre-eminence - and the hand of the most eligible woman in the realm. Combining humour, wit and imagination with deep research, this novel is a dazzling synthesis of history and fiction that takes the genre to new places. It is an epic tale of jealousy and intrigue in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, which, in its lowest moments, holds a darkened mirror to our own contemporary politics.

Jesse Norman has been the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire since 2010. As Financial Secretary to the Treasury from 2019 to 2021, he managed the UK furlough scheme and other pandemic support measures. He was made a Privy Councillor in 2019. Before entering politics, Jesse worked in the charitable sector and was a director at Barclays, among other things. He was educated at Oxford University (MA) and did an MPhil and PhD in philosophy at UCL, where he held an honorary fellowship. He is an honorary research fellow at St Andrews University, a visiting professor at the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering in Hereford, and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Jesse is the author of acclaimed biographies of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. An enthusiastic cyclist, hillwalker, wild swimmer and amateur jazz trumpeter, he is married to Kate Bingham and they have three children. The Winding Stair is his first novel.