The Heaven Tree Trilogy

About The Heaven Tree Trilogy

Better known to mystery readers as Ellis Peters, creator of Brother Cadfael, Edith Pargeter wrote extensively under her own name too, and The Heaven Tree Trilogy is her most celebrated work of straight historical fiction. Set on the Welsh Marches in the early thirteenth century, the trilogy follows Harry Talvace, a gifted stonemason and sculptor of low birth working under a proud, possessive nobleman, and the sculptor's passionate, doomed love for a woman above his station. The Heaven Tree (1960) establishes Harry's artistry and the class and power struggles that will destroy him; The Green Branch (1962) and The Scarlet Seed (1963) carry the consequences forward into the next generation, as Harry's son inherits both his father's talent and the enmities his father's life created.

Pargeter's research into medieval building, masonry and the physical craft of stone-carving is as rigorous here as her monastic detail would later be in the Cadfael novels, and the trilogy is considered by many of her readers to be her finest achievement outside the mystery genre — a sweeping, tragic story of art, class and inherited conflict against a real and richly rendered thirteenth-century Marches backdrop.