Moya O'Shea

The gripping, decades-spanning inside story of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Ministers who shaped Britain's post-war destiny. The Crown tells the inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world – Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street – and the intrigues, love lives and machinations behind the great events that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Two houses, two courts, one Crown.

A young glassworker-in-training living with his pacifist father finds his apprenticeship upended by an impending war and the arrival of an army colonel to their seaside town.

When 13-year-old Ivie starts speaking in Shakespearean verse her friends find it weird and her mother is outraged. She takes her to church to be ‘cured’ but when that fails she turns to a therapist with an equally encyclopedic knowledge of the bard. He engages Ivie in a Shakespeare face-off on the stage of the National Theatre, where the reasons for Ivie’s obsession are uncovered.