When it come to historical eras in fiction, few get a better showing than the Tudor period. Depending on your taste, you can lose yourself in a regal romance (Philippa Gregory), a historical mystery (C.J. Samson’s Shardlake series), quirky, alternate historical fantasy (MY LADY JANE), or dense tales of ambition and intrigue (Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy), just to name a few. But none are quite like THE PRETENDER, Jo Harkin’s sad and funny tale of Lambert Simnel, a young boy who may have been the heir to the Tudor throne.

Not much is known about the real Simnel, a child who found himself a pawn in a plot by Yorkist sympathizers to depose the recently crowned Henry VII. Schemers seized on Simnel’s alleged resemblance to Edward IV and declared that he was Edward, Earl of Warwick, son of the king’s treasonous late brother, George, Duke of Clarence. (The real Edward was imprisoned in the Tower of London, but was said to have escaped.) The plan to put Simnel on the throne as Edward VI failed, but the young pretender escaped execution due to his age and later worked as servant in Henry’s royal household.

"Harkin’s vivid descriptions and judicious use of historical language bring the period to life. This is no stuffy historical novel. THE PRETENDER is full of 'japes' and bawdy talk... But it’s also deeply felt and richly textured."

Harkin’s book follows the general outline of Simnel’s story, but she fills in the many gaps in the historical record with her own creative imaginings of what life must have been like for a boy plucked from obscurity and groomed to be a king. Notably, she leaves open the possibility that George succeeded in a plan to swap his real son with a peasant boy and that Simnel might be the true Earl of Warwick.

When THE PRETENDER opens, Simnel is known as John Collan. He’s the humble son of a prosperous farmer, though he has a sense that he is different from his family. Often, he catches his father looking at him as if he’s “a visitor from a very distant land, like Babylonia, or the dragon-riddled East.” John has sharp wits and a poetic disposition, so when he learns that a mysterious benefactor plans to pay for him to be tutored, he’s pleased.

But then John is whisked away from the farm and informed that he’s really an earl, thus beginning an odyssey that takes him to Oxford to Burgundy to Ireland and finally to the court of Henry VII. As he travels, his identity shifts, making John/Lambert/Edward/Simnel into a changeling perpetually unsure of his own identity. “No hearth for you, no place in all the world that will know you,” he muses, toward the end of the novel, when he’s working as a somewhat reluctant spy for the king.

Harkin’s vivid descriptions and judicious use of historical language bring the period to life. This is no stuffy historical novel. THE PRETENDER is full of “japes” and bawdy talk, as Simnel grows from an innocent boy to a more cynical and worldly young man. But it’s also deeply felt and richly textured. Simnel has little in the way of kingly ambitions, recognizing early on that he’s a chess piece to be moved about the board by more powerful players. “Knowledge may be power, but power is power. And he has none of it,” he realizes while being tutored by a “dullard” priest in Oxford. “The people with power have only used it to work him wrack.” But he does dream of using his royal position to write his own history and become “a poet king who immortalizes his own reign.”

Simnel also simmers with love for Joan, the lively and clever daughter of the Earl of Kildare, with whom he lives while he is in Ireland. More than any other character in THE PRETENDER, Joan has a clear grasp of the cruel and capricious nature of the world she inhabits. She’s unsentimental and not afraid to do some murderous plotting of her own. But all her wiles can’t save her from the vagaries of fate. Meanwhile, Simnel carries on, trying to discover his true self amid the various roles that have been thrust upon him.

In the end, it’s only once this minor player cuts himself free from the vast web of royal intrigue that he’s able to begin spinning a story all his own.