Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick's potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state within a saga of unfathomable suffering punctuated by faint glimmers of hope.
However this faintglimmerofhope in her life is destroyed by the Duke who takes Bess as a live in mistress, while halting the advances of his wife towards Grey (Dominic Cooper).