This sweeping story of turning a homebrew into a business is set in fifteenth-century England. The book was previously issued as The Brewer’s Tale – after the Canterbury Tales – which explains why most of THE LADY BREWER OF LONDON does not occur in the City of London.   In 1405, young Anneke Sheldrake of Elmham Lenn is already familiar with tragedy, having lost her Flemish mother. Women died early. Next, her merchant family is bankrupted with the loss at sea of her father’s ship. The orphaned Sheldrake siblings are soon to be homeless, apart from the oldest boy, Tobias, who is squire to the local landowner, Lord Rainford. Deciding to fight to keep her home, family and servants, Anneke takes up her mother’s family business: brewing ale from Flanders recipes.   An unwed female householder was not popular, and efforts were made to get Anneke to marry or to live with her cousins. The monastery near Elmham Lenn resents someone brewing better ale than they do. Everyone drank ale or small ale (made from the weak second washing of the grains), children included because it was safer than drinking the water. And people had to pay for ale, or make it, and if they made it they often sold it, because it didn’t keep. Many laws and taxes were in place. The first half of the book recounts the triumphs, trials and tragedies of being a town brewer. The addition of hops from the Continent enables beer making. Antagonism is personified by Master Westel Calkin, raised by monks and a worker in the brewery, but serving his own ill purposes.    Later Anneke moves her household to London and befriends a brothel owner called Goodwife Alyson, who is based on Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath. The ladies combine businesses, though, with every turn of Anneke’s story, she is sliding further from respectability. Other personages in the adventure include King Henry IV, known as Henry Bolingbroke, who at this time was quite an ill man but beset by usurpers and rebellions around the country. Medieval justice was direct and bloody.   THE LADY BREWER OF LONDON is a long read full of detail due to the depth of historical research by Karen Brooks. The strong characterisation carries us through, as we need to know what worse harm can befall Anneke, who often foreshadows the next disaster. Fighting biased, greedy authorities, she is enabled by a sea captain of the Hanse trading league and Lord Leander Rainford but continuously battles evil. Long live the lady brewer, long live independent women.