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Start giftingAthelstan (Penguin Monarchs)
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn morePenguin presents the audiobook edition of Athelstan: The Making of England by Tom Holland, read by Roy McMillan.
The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world. But King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex, his son Eadweard expanded it, and his grandson Æthelstan finally united Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and became Rex totius Britanniae.
Tom Holland recounts this extraordinarily exciting story with relish and drama. We meet the great figures of the age, including Alfred and his daughter Æthelflæd, 'Lady of the Mercians', who brought Æthelstan up at the Mercian court. At the end of the book we understand the often confusing history of the Anglo-Saxon kings better than ever before.
Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006; Millennium, a panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000; In the Shadow of the Sword, which covers the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East, and the emergence of Islam; Dynasty, a portrait of Rome's first imperial dynasty and Dominion, exploring why Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, published in 2019. His most recent book, Pax, covers the heyday of the Roman Empire, from the death of Nero to Hadrian.
Holland has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. His translation of Herodotus was published in 2013 by Penguin Classics, and his translation of Suetonius – also for Penguin Classics – comes out in 2024. His biography of Æthelstan, the first King of England, was published in 2016 under the Penguin Monarchs series.
Holland is co-presenter of the world’s most downloaded history podcast, The Rest is History. He has written and presented several TV documentaries, for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from ISIS to dinosaurs.