The Beheading Game

Disgraced. Beheaded. And out for revenge . . .
We all know what happened to Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. But what if she woke up the day after her execution and took it upon herself to seek justice?
“Fabulous! A marvelously inventive and mythic reworking of the story of Anne Boleyn. I loved it.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love
“Nobody was surprised at Anne’s conviction. The world loves to put a woman in her place.”
The Beheading Game begins in the hours after Anne Boleyn’s beheading, when she wakes to find herself unceremoniously buried in an arrow chest, her head wrapped in linen at her knees. Discarded by King Henry VIII for not being able to give him a male heir, reviled by Cromwell for being too smart for her own good, and executed based on trumped-up charges, Anne escapes the tower, sews her head back on, and sets out on a quest for vengeance.
Traveling in the guise of a commoner, with the help of a prostitute, Anne navigates the London streets she never before walked and soon realizes how little she knew about life in the real world. If Kelly Link had teamed up with Hilary Mantel, the result might be The Beheading Game. An epic journey through the wilds of British royal history and a prescient reminder that “mouthy” women have always been punished, The Beheading Game finally allows one of history’s most maligned women a chance to tell her side of the story.

Rebecca Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize (selected by Ross Gay); and The Sweating Sickness. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, NPR’s The Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College.