Thomas Penn’s weighty new volume takes as its titular subject the lives of these three brothers. But The Brothers York is primarily a biography of the charismatic Edward — and a superb biography at that.

... this vast, sprawling book offers an epic orgy of colour and character: there are soldiers and townsmen, poets and pirates, battlefield massacres and hidden murders. But the figure of Edward IV stands out.

... rip-roaring.

Mr. Penn’s narrative is rich in detail, and he leads the reader through a dense and dark forest with masterly skill.

Penn’s first book, a biography of Henry VII – arguably the Tudor monarch with the lowest public profile – showed that he could craft pacy and convincing accounts out of 15th-century source materials. In The Brothers York, he succeeds again, smoothing the period’s interlocking alliances and multigenerational feuds into a narrative that is always readable and even thrilling.

The horror of fratricide is merely the price of admission to the family drama Penn here relates. By the time Edward has George murdered, readers have already watched these two and Richard plot against and brood about each other for hundreds of pages, and Penn’s superb gifts as a storyteller make those pages as enjoyable an account of this chaotic period in English history as anything since Thomas Costain’s The Last Plantagenets nearly 60 years ago.

The amount of research that has gone into this account is thoroughly impressive, captured most brilliantly in a concise manner, with salient explanations achieved by referring to the accounts and publications from the time.

[Penn] he combines a keen sense of time, place, circumstance and anecdote with a firm grasp of human psychology, of the macabre, the comic and the tragic, and – perhaps as important as any of these – an instinct for the rhythm of a sentence.

... gripping.

Sufficient documentation, aided by Penn’s entertaining, easy to follow narrative, makes their lives and times real.

... presented as a triptych portrait of Edward and his younger brothers, George, duke of Clarence and Richard III. But it is for the most part a straight biography of Edward. His reign occupies the first 453 pages of a 688-page text. He is the central, real sun in the parhelion, his siblings wan imitations by his side. They rise with him, but soon disappear.

... readable.

A dramatic portrait of 15th-century England, which was besieged by political upheaval, betrayals, and ruthless violence. Penn...brings keen understanding and a sharp eye for detail to his prodigiously researched, engrossing history of the decadeslong conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York that ended, in 1485, with the advent of Henry VII.

Penn recreates the jousting tournaments, battlefield clashes, and ever-shifting political alliances of the era, adding texture and color to the historical record.