The German Woman

Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine was born in 1872, a much-loved grand-daughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. Forty-six years later, as ex-Empress Alexandra of Russia, she died in a hail of bullets in a remote Siberian cellar, the hated 'German woman' of revolutionary propaganda, an unbending autocrat paradoxically believed to have taken an illiterate peasant as her lover.

In this fictionalised autobiography, Alexandra tells her own story for the first time. It is the tale of a longing for meaning and acceptance that began in her lonely childhood and of her passionate love affair with Nicholas, the last Tsar of Russia. It is the story of how intensely she strove to understand the whole of Nicholas's world. Seen from Alexandra's perspective in a way that is often lost in conventional biographies, this a tale of colourful individuals: her children Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and Alexei, her friends and enemies, the politicians who fought and gossiped, and of how she came to depend on the peasant Rasputin, told without a touch of the melodrama that disfigures so many accounts of his life. It is the story of how she and Nicholas handled the drama of the Russian Revolution and the changed lives they lived in captivity.

As close to history as historical fiction gets, this book also contains an extensive and fascinating cast of characters.