MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) - Brazil midfielder Fernandinho is hoping to catch the eye of his national team manager before next year's World Cup on home soil by shining for his new club Manchester City.

The pacy 28-year-old joined the Premier League club from Ukrainian side Shakhtar Donetsk last month for what British media have widely reported to be about 30 million pounds and is keen to prove he is worth every penny.

"It was very important for me (to be City's top close season target) and I want to repay the club for what they have done for me by playing well on the pitch and winning as many matches and as many trophies as possible," he told a news conference on Wednesday.

"My first aim is to play well for my club Manchester City and if I do have good performances I'm sure that I will catch the attention of the national manager."

Fernandinho, who has five international caps, was not in Luiz Felipe Scolari's Brazil squad for last month's Confederations Cup which the hosts won with a 3-0 victory over Spain in the final.

He is known in England for scoring in Shakhtar's 2-1 win at home to Chelsea in the Champions League group stage last season.

Fernandinho started his career with Atletico Paranaense in his homeland before becoming one of a host of talented Brazilians to head for Shakhtar with whom he spent the last eight seasons and won the 2009 UEFA Cup.

He expects a few differences now he is playing in England.

"The main challenge for me is the different style of play compared with my last team and also the amount of games you play throughout the season," said Fernandinho, sitting next to his new manager Manuel Pellegrini but, unlike the Chilean, speaking through an interpreter.

"It's much more than I was used to."

Yet the most likely first-time homeowners, especially young professionals and couples starting families, won't buy these days. Or they can't. Or they already did, during the housing boom. And their absence helps explain why the housing industry is still depressed.

The obstacles range from higher down payments to heavy debt from credit cards and student loans. But even many of those who could afford to buy no longer see it as a wise investment. Prices have sunk 15 percent in three years.

"I've looked for a home, but the places we can afford with the money we have are not that great," says Seth Herter, 23, a store manager in suburban St. Louis. "It also doesn't seem smart anymore to buy with prices falling. Buying a home just doesn't make sense to us."

The proportion of U.S. households that own homes is at 65.1 percent, its lowest point since 1996, the Census Bureau says. That marks a shift after nearly two decades in which homeownership grew before peaking at 70 percent during the housing boom.

The housing bubble lured so many young buyers that it reduced the pool of potential first-timers to below-normal levels. That's contributed to the decline in new buyers in recent years.

In 2005, at the height of the boom, about 2.8 million first-timers bought homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. By contrast, for each of the four years preceding the boom, the number of first-timers averaged fewer than 2 million.

Still, the bigger factors are the struggling economy, shaky job security, tougher credit rules and lack of cash to put down, said Dan McCue, research manager at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. The unemployment rate among typical first-timers, those ages 25 to 34, is 9.8 percent, compared with 9 percent for all adults.

"The obstacles facing first-time buyers are big, and it's changing the way they look at home ownership," McCue says. "It's no longer the American Dream for the younger generation."

First-timers usually account for up to half of all sales. Over the past year, they've accounted for only about a third.

A big reason is tougher lending standards.

Lenders are demanding more money up front. In 2002, the median down payment for a single-family home in nine major U.S. cities was 4 percent, according to real estate website Zillow.com. Today, it's 22 percent.

And one-third of households have credit scores too low to qualify for a mortgage. The median required credit score from FICO Inc., the industry leader in credit ratings, has risen from 720 in 2007, when the market went bust, to 760 today.

Homes in many places are the most affordable in a generation. In the past year, the national median sale price has sunk 3.5 percent. Half the homes listed in the Tampa Bay area are priced below $100,000.

The average mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed loan is 4 percent, barely above an all-time low. Five years ago, it was near 6.5 percent. In 2000, it exceeded 8 percent.

When the economy eventually strengthens, the housing market will, too. More people will be hired. Confidence will rise. Down payments won't be so hard to produce.

The question is whether first-time buyers will then start flowing into the housing market. That will depend mainly on whether they think prices will rise, said Mark Vitner, senior U.S. economist at Wells Fargo.

"It's a guessing game as to when things will turn around," Vitner said. "But until they do, you won't see young people buying homes."

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Alzheimer's experts plan to protest proposed Medicare guidelines that would deny coverage of an Eli Lilly diagnostic test for the disease unless patients are taking part one of several clinical trials in which the $3,000 test is being used.

Eli Lilly and Co and the Alzheimer's Association have objected to the draft guidelines, issued last week by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency that runs Medicare. Both plan to pressure CMS to change the guidelines, saying they deny some patients the chance to get an accurate diagnosis. The final rule goes into effect in October.

CMS said it made the decision because there was not enough evidence that the test - a radioactive drug used with PET imaging - improves patient care. At the same time, it conceded there was evidence the tests could rule out Alzheimer's in difficult-to-diagnose cases and help identify good candidates for clinical trials into more effective treatments or prevention strategies.

Patient advocates and the company say the decision might slow the development of future diagnostic tests for Alzheimer's and deny patients with symptoms the chance to find out whether they have Alzheimer's or some other disease that causes symptoms of dementia.

Several experts say there is still much to learn about what a positive scan might mean, and believe CMS' decision to at least cover scans used in clinical trials may help in the search for treatments for the fatal, brain-wasting disease that affects 5 million Americans and 38 million people worldwide.

HINDERING TIMELY DIAGNOSIS

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has already approved Lilly's compound, known as Amyvid. But Medicare reimbursement is seen as critical for the company because most people begin showing signs of dementia at around age 65, the age when Medicare coverage kicks in.

"Restricting coverage could hinder a timely and accurate diagnosis," said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, president and chief executive of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc, a Lilly subsidiary. "It may stifle future innovation."

In addition to Lilly, the draft guidance could affect imaging agents being developed by General Electric Co's GE Healthcare, and Piramal Imaging, a unit of India's Piramal Enterprises, which acquired Bayer AG's agent last year. Both have compounds under review at the FDA and the European Medicines Agency.

All three are radioactive tracers designed to light up deposits of an Alzheimer's-related protein called beta amyloid when used in conjunction with brain scans known as positron emission tomography, or PET.

Scientists believe these Alzheimer's-linked plaques start developing at least a decade before symptoms occur, and spotting changes in the brain early offers the best chance to intervene with new drugs that might prevent or delay the disease.

Instead of agreeing to routinely pay for the $3,000 test, CMS proposed "Coverage with Evidence Development," a designation that suggests there are still gaps in the evidence over the benefits of the test. That allows CMS to gather more data by paying for scans in patients taking part in trials. CMS could use the data to render a decision on wider coverage.

"Essentially, they acknowledge that there is the possibility that coverage is important, but they don't understand it quite yet," said Maria Carrillo, vice president of medical and scientific Relations at the Alzheimer's Association.

Before the decision, the Alzheimer's Association and the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging sent CMS a report detailing the limited circumstances under which the test would be appropriate for certain patients. That might include helping to tell which patients have Alzheimer's and which have another form of dementia involving the shrinking of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain.

Robert Egge, vice president of public policy at the Alzheimer's Association, said the group will urge doctors and patients to provide feedback on the document during the 30-day public comment period. And he said the group will consider other options, including lobbying lawmakers.

Egge said the CMS guidelines contradict the spirit of the National Alzheimer's Plan, a sweeping effort to find an effective way to prevent or treat Alzheimer's by 2025 and improve the care of those already afflicted.

Wei-Li Shao, director of Lilly's Alzheimer's business, said the company will meet with the agency to lay out its case.

"One in five patients who are told they have Alzheimer's don't have it," he said. "Diagnosing Alzheimer's can be really difficult. Knowing someone's amyloid status, or knowing they've got amyloid in the brain, is valuable information."

In April 2012, Lilly became the first company to win U.S. marketing approval for Amyvid, but without Medicare approval, use of the drug has been limited to individuals with the means to pay for the scans themselves and to coverage by private insurance companies on a case by case basis.

The drug had first-quarter sales of $500,000 and demand is growing, Shao said. It is available at 450 imaging centers across the country and more than 1,000 doctors are trained to read it.

WHAT DOES A POSITIVE SCAN MEAN?

But some doctors are concerned Medicare approval might prod healthy people who are worried about their memory to pressure their doctors for the test.

"I think CMS found a way to do something truly constructive while holding back what will undoubtedly be a tsunami of worried well" who may discover they have amyloid in their brains, said Dr. Sam Gandy, an Alzheimer's expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"They would have no idea if or when their brains would begin to curdle in response to the amyloid, setting them on the road to dementia," Gandy said.

Lilly, in its statement, says its test was not designed to predict whether Alzheimer's would develop, only to rule out Alzheimer's in patients. A negative scan for the presence of beta amyloid would indicate other potential causes of dementia.

That still leaves the problem of what to tell patients who have a positive scan, said Dr. Ronald Petersen, an Alzheimer's expert at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

In someone with a precursor condition to Alzheimer's known as mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, a positive scan may mean a higher risk of advancing to Alzheimer's more quickly than a negative scan would indicate, he said. "The data are accumulating, but I don't know if they are there yet."

At Mayo, Petersen is conducting a study of thousands of cognitively normal people to try to answer that question.

As companies work on new drugs, having tests that identify the disease will be essential, said Dr. Steven DeKosky of the University of Virginia.

"One of the reasons for trying to do these studies now is to know what we will actually do once we have drugs that will make a difference," he said.

(Editing by Prudence Crowther and Doina Chiacu)

Audio recordings from the accident indicate the crew did not realize they were in trouble until seconds before hitting the seawall at the end of the runway, a calamitous impact that broke off the tail and sent the fuselage bouncing and skidding across the airfield.

Investigators have a general idea of the events that preceded the crash. But they need to hear the pilots' accounts to understand why the jetliner went down on a clear day with no sign of mechanical trouble.

Here is what is known: Seven seconds before impact, someone in the cockpit asked for more speed after apparently noticing that the jet was flying far slower than its recommended landing speed. A few seconds later, the pilot's yoke began to vibrate violently, an automatic low-speed warning to get the pilot's attention. One and a half seconds before impact came a command to abort the landing.

Those are the few details the National Transportation Safety Board has released so far from cockpit voice recordings, air traffic control details and flight data collected from the smashed jet, which slammed tail-first into the waterfront tarmac Saturday.

The plane's airspeed was quickly emerging as the main focus of the investigation. All aircraft have minimum safe flying speeds that must be maintained or pilots risk an aerodynamic stall that robs a plane of the lift it needs to stay airborne. Below those speeds, planes become unmaneuverable.

Because pilots, not the control tower, are responsible for the approach and landing, former NTSB Chairman James Hall said, the cockpit communications will be key to figuring out what went wrong.

"Good communication with the flight crew as well as the flight attendants is something I'm sure they're going to look at closely with this event," he said Tuesday. "Who was making decisions?"

Hall was on the transportation board when a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 crashed in Guam in 1997, an accident investigators blamed in part on an authoritarian cockpit culture that made newer pilots reluctant to challenge captains.

Since then, there's been broad training and requirements for crew resource management, a communications system or philosophy airline pilots are taught in part so that pilots who not at the controls feel free to voice any safety concerns or correct any unsafe behavior, even if it means challenging a more senior pilot or saying something that might give offense.

If any of the Asiana pilots "saw something out of parameters for safe landing," they were obligated to speak up, said Cass Howell, an associate dean at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

"There are dozens and dozens of accidents that were preventable had someone been able to speak up when they should have, but they were reluctant to do so for any number of reasons, including looking stupid or offending the captain," said Howell, a former Marine Corps pilot.

There's been no indication, from verbal calls or mechanical issues, that an emergency was ever declared by pilots, who included a captain who was training on the 777 and landing one in San Francisco for the first time. While four pilots were aboard, it is not clear if all four were in the cockpit when they landed.

"We're looking at what they were doing, and we want to understand why they were doing it," Deborah Hersman, head of the NTSB, said Monday. "We want to understand what they knew and what they understood."

Hersman said she hoped to provide more details from the interviews during a news briefing scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

It's unlikely there was a lot of chatter as the plane came in. The Federal Aviation Administration's "sterile cockpit" rules require pilots to refrain from any unnecessary conversation while the plane is below 10,000 feet so that their attention is focused on taking off or landing. What little conversation takes places is supposed to be necessary to safely completing the task at hand.

Choi Jeong-ho, a senior official for South Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, told reporters in a briefing Tuesday in South Korea that investigators from both countries questioned two of the four Asiana pilots, Lee Gang-guk and Lee Jeong-min, on Monday. They planned to question the other two pilots and air controllers Tuesday.

Choi said recorded conversation between the pilots and air controllers at the San Francisco airport would be investigated, too.

In addition, authorities were reviewing the initial rescue efforts after fire officials acknowledged that one of their trucks might have run over one of the two Chinese teenagers killed in the crash. The students, Wang Linjia and Ye Mengyuan, were part of a larger group headed for a Christian summer camp with dozens of classmates.

Asiana President Yoon Young-doo arrived in San Francisco from South Korea on Tuesday morning, fighting his way through a pack of journalists outside customs.

He said he will look at the efforts of airline employees to help injured passengers and their family members, visit with the NTSB and other organizations to apologize for the crash and try to meet injured passengers.

Yoon said he can't meet with the Asiana pilots because no outside contact with them is allowed until the investigation is completed.

Yoon said Lee Jeong-min, a 777 pilot, was the pilot on 33 flights to San Francisco, and Lee Gang-guk was a pilot on 29 flights into San Francisco but on other planes.

Lee Jeong-min had been named a training pilot on the flight because he was among the top 25 percent of Asiana pilots, Yoon said. Lee Gang-guk had logged nearly 10,000 hours operating other planes but had only 43 hours in the 777, a plane he still was getting used to flying, said Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin.

More than 180 people aboard the plane went to hospitals with injuries. But remarkably, more than a third didn't even require hospitalization.

The passengers included 141 Chinese, 77 South Koreans, 64 Americans, three Canadians, three Indians, one Japanese, one Vietnamese and one person from France.

South Korea officials said 39 people remained hospitalized in seven different hospitals in San Francisco.

The flight originated in Shanghai, China, and stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco.

___

Associated Press writers Jason Dearen, Terry Collins, Paul Elias, Lisa Leff and Sudhin Thanawala in San Francisco and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul also contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Programs designed to prevent childhood obesity in the home don't affect kids' weight a year or more down the line, according to a review of the evidence.

But that conclusion comes from only a small number of available studies on the programs, and doesn't prove that such studies can't work, according to lead author Dr. Nakiya Showell.

"We need additional studies to answer this question, especially studies with greater number of participants, greater program exposure among participants and longer participant followup," said Showell, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Other studies have shown that family influence and home environment play an important role in preventing childhood obesity, which affects about 17 percent of American children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the review, the researchers analyzed the results of the six best studies on home based programs for kids. Three included diet and exercise, one was on diet alone and two also included primary care or school programs. The kids ranged from two to 18 years old.

"Most programs involved educating children and their parents or family about healthy diet and physical activity choices (i.e. increasing fruit and vegetable intake, increasing daily physical activity, decreasing TV/computer screen time, etc.)," Showell told Reuters Health by email.

Some, but not all, included actual exercise sessions, she said.

The studies either compared the home-based program to another program or to a comparison group of kids not enrolled in any program. All measured the kids' weight or body mass index (BMI), an indication of body fat percentage, at least one year after the program had ended, to see if it had any effect.

Some of the programs did result in kids eating more fruits and veggies or getting up and moving around more than the comparison groups, but none affected kids' weight or BMI, according to results published in the journal Pediatrics.

In each study, the percentage of kids qualifying as overweight or obese was the same in the program group and the comparison group.

Among the three studies that showed the programs worked, although not for weight, the findings may have been because those programs had components in schools or primary care.

There isn't enough evidence out there to draw real conclusions about these programs, according to Helen Skouteris, who was not involved in the study.

And the few that were available for study included children in a wide range of ages, in fact too wide a range to synthesize the results, Skouteris, of Deakin University in Burwood Victoria, Australia, told Reuters Health.

It is also troubling that the study did not include details about parental influences like role modeling, encouragement and feeding behaviors, which should not be ignored, she said.

It's unclear how best to improve these programs, but "In my opinion as a pediatrician and pediatric obesity researcher, home-based obesity prevention programs should include additional components beyond what is described in this particular review," Showell said.

The programs should stress family and parental involvement and also address access to healthy food and space for play in the community, she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/13yAfIs Pediatrics, online June 10, 2013.

Astronomers using the planet-huntinghave found two planets circling different stars in the violent environment of an ancient open star cluster called NGC 6811 located about 3,300 light-years from Earth. Until now, four of the more than 850 planets known outside the solar system were spotted in clusters.

The planets Kepler-66b and Kepler-67b are both smaller than the planets previously found in clusters. They are slightly smaller than Neptune, but larger than the Earth and circle sunlike stars. []

"We don't have any planet that falls in that size bin or that mass bin between the Earth and Neptune, so we have to try to speculate about how they might be, structurally speaking," lead study author Soren Meibom, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said. "It's unlikely that they're completely solid like the Earth because there is no precedence for that. If you have a planet this size, three-quarters the , about three Earth radii, it's very likely to have a gaseous envelope, so it's kind of in between a rocky planet like a Neptune but we don't have any analogue in the solar system, so we're left guessing a little bit."

The new research is detailed in the June 27 issue of the journal Nature.

Forming in a cluster

Some scientists thought that it would be more difficult forto survive in star clusters because of the turbulent environment that surrounds them. Supernova explosions and the movements of other stars in the cluster can change the orbits of planets that formed around relatively stable stars. []

The orbits of Kepler-66b and Kepler-67b, however, do not seem to have been disturbed since their formation one billion years ago, Meibom said.

These planets are also unique because they are the first cluster-based planets to be discovered by transiting passing between their star and the Earth. This allowed Meibom to measure their relatively small size.

"Big planets are easier to find, but if they are less common than small ones, we may not find them," William Welsh, an astronomer at San Diego State University who is unaffiliated with the research, said. "Previousin clusters didn't find any planets, but it's not because planets are rare. It's because 1) planets as small as the ones in this paper are extremely hard, if not impossible, to detect using a ground-based telescope; and (2) the large Jupiter-size planets that could have been found are less common than the harder-to-see and more common small planets."

Just as common

Meibom and his team used data they collected from 377 stars in the cluster to understand the frequency of finding cluster-based planets versus planets circling stars in the open field. They found that astronomers can expect to detect a similar number of mini-Neptunes in both the field and in clusters.

These types of planets could be just as commonly found orbiting stars in clusters as they are around other kinds of stars.

"The two planets we found are going around their stars over a time of 15 and 17 days respectively and that is also a very typical orbital period for planets found outside of clusters," Meibom said. "Both the frequency and the properties in terms of size and orbital period are consistent with what we see outside of clusters."

This finding might also help scientists understand whethercould form in clusters, however, it is still unclear whether life could exist while a young star remains within a cluster.

"The sun was once part of a cluster, and our solar system planets formed while part of the cluster," Welsh wrote in an email to SPACE.com. "Life probably did not emerge while the sun was part of the cluster, though that depends on how long it took for the cluster to dissolve. But the reason for that may be more due to the bombardment of the very young Earth by proto-planetary debris than anything to do with the cluster environment Life probably did not get a permanent foot-hold on Earth while we were part of a cluster, if the cluster dispersed in less than 700 million years."

Future missions

It could also be possible to search for planets in closer star clusters like the Pleiades or the Hyades, but it might not happen for a while, Meibom said. Kepler cannot hunt for planets in those closer clusters because it is focused on only one part of the distant sky, and ground-based methods have not been powerful enough to detect any small planets as of yet.

Future missions, however, could help scientists investigate these closer clusters, Meibom said. NASA's planned Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launching in 2017, will search for planets transiting in front of smaller and cooler stars the most common in the galaxy.

This is the second bit of surprising exoplanet news in as many days. Scientists recently foundof a star 22 light-years from Earth.

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The 40-year-old All-Star right wing was captain of the Senators and his decision not to re-sign with the team was a surprise.

Alfredsson will join a Red Wings roster featuring fellow Swedes Henrik Zetterberg, Johan Franzen, Gustav Nyquist, Niklas Kronwall and Jonathan Ericsson.

Media reports said Alfredsson had signed a one-year $5.5 million deal.

There were 20 signings in the first hour of free agency, including forward Nathan Horton going to the Columbus Blue Jackets for a seven-year contract.

Horton had spent the past three seasons with the Boston Bruins and is facing time off for shoulder surgery in the off-season.

Ottawa brought in left wing Clarke MacArthur on a two-year deal after he scored eight goals and 20 points for the Toronto Maple Leafs last season.

The Edmonton Oilers snapped up defenseman Andrew Ference on a four-year deal, reported to be worth $13 million.

The 34-year-old Ference, born in Edmonton, entered free agency after playing with Boston for seven seasons.

The Bruins, defeated by the Chicago Blackhawks in this season's Stanley Cup finals, were busy making deals of their own with a 'blockbuster' trade with the Dallas Stars.

The Bruins signed forwards Loui Eriksson, Reilly Smith and Matt Fraser and defenseman Joe Morrow from Dallas for centers Tyler Seguin and Rich Peverley and defenseman Ryan Button, the teams announced on Thursday.

The New York Islanders re-signed Kazakh goaltender Evgeni Nabokov and the Philadelphia Flyers added goaltender Ray Emery from Chicago. Both were one-year deals.

The Carolina Hurricanes brought in defenseman Mike Komisarek on a one-year deal after Toronto allowed him to enter free agency.

(Reporting By Simon Evans in Miami, editing by Gene Cherry)

Uruzgan provincial government spokesman Abdullah Himmat says authorities are trying to determine how the suicide bomber passed three checkpoints to enter the crowded hall Friday at about 12:30 p.m.

He says the bomber entered the dining hall and detonated a suicide vest just inside the door. The dining hall was on a base used by police assigned to secure the main highway to neighboring Kandahar.

Afghan media reported 10 of the 12 victims were Afghan national police officers. Himmat however would only say that the dead were "primarily police." Five other people were wounded in the explosion.

"After careful consideration, Ballantine Books has made the difficult decision to cancel the publication, 'Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up,'" the publisher said in a statement.

Ballantine declined to elaborate on its decision to scrap the book by Deen, considered the queen of Southern cooking.

Orders of the book, which was scheduled for an October release, will not be fulfilled, the imprint of Bertelsmann SE's Random House said, adding that the cookbook of lighter Southern cuisine had not gone to press.

Deen, 66, who had a multimillion-dollar enterprise built on books, restaurants, television shows and housewares, has lost about a dozen business deals after a deposition surfaced last week in which the TV chef admitted to using the "N-word."

The controversy pushed pre-order sales of her forthcoming cookbook to the top of Amazon's best-sellers list and copies of 2011's "Paula Deen's Southern Cooking Bible," which was published by CBS Corp's Simon & Schuster Inc, is No. 2 on the list.

"Paula Deen's New Testament" was going to be the first book in a two-book deal with Ballantine.

Pharmacy chain Walgreens, department store JC Penney and Sears Holdings Corp, which owns department store Sears and discount retailer Kmart, all said on Friday they planned to discontinue Deen's product lines.

Scripps Networks Interactive Inc's cable TV channel the Food Network, which aired Deen's cooking shows, was the first to drop Deen last week.

A number of companies have severed ties with the chef, including Caesars Entertainment Corp, which operated Deen-branded restaurants; retailers Target Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc; and Danish drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S, which used Deen as a pitchwoman.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Mary Milliken and Eric Beech)

TOKYO (Reuters) - What would have happened if Anne Boleyn, the wife of Henry VIII and mother of Elizabeth I, had given her husband the son he so desperately wanted instead of miscarrying and eventually losing her head as a traitor?

This is the premise behind "The Boleyn King" by Laura Anderson, the first book of a trilogy set to take a look at the reign of Henry IX, known as William, in a Tudor court where Henry VIII had only two wives rather than six.

William, an impetuous 17 year-old with one year left under a regency, is aching to prove himself as both king and man. He trusts only three people: his older sister Elizabeth, his best friend Domenic, and Minuette, an orphan raised as a royal ward and companion for Elizabeth.

Anderson spoke with Reuters about the pleasures and pains of reimagining history.

Q: I hear this got started from a historical footnote. How did you discover it and where did you go from there?

A: I was reading a biography of Anne Boleyn. I was struck by the detail that her final miscarriage, which took place at around four or five months along, was of a baby boy, and it happened on the very day that Catherine of Aragon was buried. I couldn't stop thinking about the irony of that, that the day when she should have been finally free was pretty much the last nail in her coffin. I couldn't stop thinking about how something as personal and domestic as a miscarriage could change history.

Q: How did you take it from there?

A: It sat for a little while, and a few months later I was in London with my younger boys, where I'd been before. But I was quite taken at Hampton Court and the Tower of London with imagining a character who turns out to be Domenic, and kept thinking 'ooh, there's something going on here.' Then somehow the ideas just married themselves without any conscious thought.

Q: How did you make William a person?

A: He was tricky, because I didn't want to make him a carbon copy of his father. I was sure that Anne would have been quite an influence on him... At a certain point I just had to remind myself that whether they were real people, or part of a real family with a certain bloodline, they have to become my characters or I become paralyzed, and I just can't write.

I think Will was always fairly specific to me in being incredibly quick, and also impetuous, but paying more attention than the adults around him think he is. He spoke with a pretty clear voice to me from the beginning. Actually it's been writing the later (books) that I've had to put more thought into listening to him, and seeing how he changes.

Q: The foursome is a very interesting part of the book.

A: I knew I needed a young woman who wasn't Elizabeth, and Minuette was there pretty much from the start. I also thought it would be interesting to see the dynamics of Elizabeth having a friend, in a world that is a safer world for her. By the time she's a queen, it's mainly a world of men, and she didn't have quite as much time for women. So I wanted to see the relationship there. From the beginning it was clear there was going to be a problem of the king being in love with someone who's in love with someone else, to up the tension of course - and it's great to make that his friend.

Q: The romantic triangle was there from the start?

A: It was. At the Tower of London I had a pretty clear impression of a scene that's going to come quite late in book three that was the heart of the triangle.

Q: The character of Elizabeth in this is interesting. Would she really have been that close to a brother?

A: Elizabeth was my trickiest character, because I have a great deal of respect for her and want to respect who she actually was. My number one thought process as I've gone over the course of three books is trying to create a world that will lead to her being the kind of queen she was in the real world. So although her mother lived, her other experiences and traumas that would help shape her to be the slightly warier, more guarded queen that she's going to be.

She will still be queen. It was the one absolute I came up against in my head from the very first day. I could not imagine a world in which Elizabeth Tudor was not queen, just because she was such an influence.

Q: People who play with alternate history sometimes take really dramatic leaps, why do you think that couldn't happen?

A: I felt like I was writing a specific story for a specific time period, I wasn't trying to create an entirely alternate universe. I was quite happy to be able to return things to the normal flow.

Q: What's the appeal of this kind of historical question and following it up?

A: I think the appeal is almost the eternal appeal of all storytelling - what if this happened - but it's laden with a heavier emotional context because we already have a context for what happened. A lot of the fun is playing with the people and the actual events that happened in their lives, that are now not going to happen in quite that way. I have fun trying to play with that and use their personalities and things that really befell them. To turn it on its head and come at it sideways.

(Reporting by Elaine Lies, editing by Paul Casciato)