A young girl is plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea. In her diaries, she chronicles the intrigues of courtly life and her own extraordinary existence.

Two hundred years later, the Red Queens ghost haunts Dr Babs Halliwell, an Oxford academic obsessed with her memoirs and possessed by the many parallels with her own complicated past. But why and how does she keep the Red Queens story alive?

The inimitable Margaret Drabble offers a rich and atmospheric historical novel, where the dead wander among the living and ask what it means to be remembered.