On December 10, 1936, King Edward VIII brought a great international drama to a close when he abdicated, renouncing the throne of the United Kingdom for himself and his heirs. The reason he gave when addressing his subjects was that he could not fulfill his duties without the woman he loved by his side. The woman who caused this historic rupture of centuries of British rule was the notorious American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

Informed by archival material never before seen, as well as by interviews with many of Edward and Wallis’s close friends who have never spoken publicly before, Larman creates an hour-by-hour, day-by-day suspenseful narrative that brings readers up to the point where the microphone is turned on and the king speaks to his subjects.

For the first time in a book about the abdication, readers will read an in-depth account of the assassination attempt on Edward’s life, a first-person chronicle of Wallis Simpson’s divorce proceedings, information from the Royal Archives about the government’s worries about Edward’s relationship with Nazi high-command Ribbentrop and a boots-on-the-ground view of how the British people saw Edward as they watched the drama unfold. You won’t be able to put down Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis, a full panorama of the people and the times surrounding Edward and the woman he loved.