This “pretty prison” is a girls’ school rife with bullying, a miniature town of lazy, sluttish women waddling around with their pampered children, gossiping, sleeping and painting faces.They are stock. “Every new acquisition is subjected to an obligatory fattening,” and Helen is duly stuffed with rich food and instructed in the art of pleasing the emperor. As well as the women and eunuchs, there is a palace staff of slaves, whom the emperor mates to produce “giant cubs” for fighting. Malia, a formidable crone with one very long hooked fingernail for performing abortions, “keeps notes on the pedigree of his entire herd”.The harem seethes with intrigue Someone is trying to poison the emperor’s wives Sorcery is suspected. Helen’s friend, the defiant Naseem, is gathering a coterie of female lovers. The dwarf nightly makes love with Batoom, “the Black Queen, tall and magnificent, gliding gracefully along, barefoot, barrel-arsed, with her water jar on her head”.His affections, however, are soon straying to his countrywoman, the bewildered Helen. She in turn falls in love with the emperor, equal parts charming lover, tantrum-throwing toddler and psychopath.Here and there Taylor lapses into banal soap-opera dialogue and awkward exposition; she’s also guilty of a few anachronistic clunks, mostly in modernly expressed attitudes that simply don’t ring true Taylor has great panache, however.

The pages turn, the book rolls along, from gloopy sentiment to slurpy sex to stark horror that, at one point, had me turning aside.In full flight, the prose soars. After days of rain, “The harem smells of moss and mould as our stocks of firewood burgeon forth with all variety of mushroom, and the rush mats take root and sprout green beards… The slaves are forever sweeping up fallen leaves, which seem imbued with glue and coalesce in slimy heaps which must be scraped up.. Thus does the Green Queen reclaim her dominion” This is a lush, sinister book, which I enjoyed tremendously. The reviewer’s new novel, ‘Turn Again Home’, appears next month from Virago. HarperCollins £20, 535pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Hambledon & London £25, 410pp £23 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Jonathan Cape £20, 621pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122

HarperCollins £20, 535pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Hambledon & London £25, 410pp £23 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122 / Jonathan Cape £20, 621pp £18 (plus £1.99 p&p per order) from 0870 8001122
Books with royal titles overflow their shelves in Waterstone’s. But it’s hard to believe anyone keen to pay £20 for a Tudor history doesn’t already know a lot of what it will contain Familiarity is the charm.

We’re revisiting stalled bloodlines and the female regiment at a time of anxiety about nationality, genetics, feminism and monarchy.Little new research is visible: the reader of the already-read meets the writer of the already-written in Tudorland, a site of agreed meanings. The grimmest narratives remain pleasantly picturesque, since beheading is unlikely to return to Britain – if it does, the chunky biogs could double as blocks.The genre has favoured Scotland recently. Murders and blood-feuds merely squalid when perpetrated by chaps called Ali and Milosevic bond romantically on to our island story with chaps called Hepburn and Douglas. Tudorland language is reassuring, its pockets of archaism linking now to then She learnt she was to die on the morrow It was ever thus She was but a girl.