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My Son, the Soldier
This book portrays the sacrifice of those who served in the First World War from 1914–1918. A story that honours those who forfeited everything for their king and country, My Son the Soldier is aimed at young adults and older and aims for rigorous historical accuracy. This book includes images which are integral in setting the scene, and which will captivate the attention of the reader. This book is written as if from the perspective of those captured in the pictures and seeks to understand their attempts to come to terms with what they have witnessed and endured.
This book asks profound and challenging questions of the reader and, more importantly, seeks to draw out the human side, and the human cost, of the First World War. Drawing on historical scholarship, while approaching these traumatic events from a deeply human perspective, this book will both fascinate and inspire the reader.
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Monsieur Law
LM Shakespeare is the writer of the acclaimed 17th-century historical novel Malice and of three modern financial thrillers. Monsieur Law thrillingly combines these two worlds.
France, following the death of Louis XIV, was bankrupt, but into the court of the Regent there arrived a Scot called John Law, whose courage combined with a brilliant financial intellect briefly fired the whole country with a wild excitement which very nearly succeeded. This is history in the genre of Munich and Wolf Hall.
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Missing in Action Presumed Dead WW1
Chris Clark, a soldier from Sheffield, is fighting on the Western Front. Siggi Haas, a soldier from Berlin, is also fighting on the Western Front. They were just ordinary young men before the war started and now, their lives have been cast to Fate. Chris worked in a steelworks and was happy with his lot. Siggi was an assistant history teacher and looking forward to becoming a good teacher. They were uprooted from their normal environment and thrust into a world of war, as so many others were. They knew nothing of war and assumed it to be something gallant and adventurous. They even assumed they might enact some heroic deed.
There were so many heroes in the Great War and so many battles that I have not mentioned because this is a story based mainly, but not entirely, on the Western Front. It concentrates on the events surrounding Chris and Siggi, being the British Army and the German Army.
The words of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and leaders have been taken from letters, diaries, memoirs or documents — real people experiencing real events. However, Chris Clark, his family and friends are fictional, as are Siggi Haas, his family and friends. Some of the men in this book died in the Great War, some lived and some endured something in between living and death.£3.50 -
Midnight in Westminster Abbey
The English kings who rise from their graves in Westminster Abbey on All Souls' Eve are in a terrible fix. They want visiting New Yorker Charlie Chancer to use his special IT skills to steal abbey funds and send them off to queens who have already come to life and escaped the abbey. Handsome commodities trader Charlie is also in a bind. He has whisked his young son, Georgie, away to London (amid a bitter custody battle with his ex-wife) to join his teenage daughter, Ginny, who is on a student exchange. Tudor queens show Georgie architectural wonders of the abbey. Plantagenet kings give Ginny picturesque tutorials on their colourful but devastating battles. But what are the kings to do with these visitors who have seen their dazzling coronation ceremony and their daring TV games? Kill them or free them when they may tell what they have seen?
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Metamorphoses
“Returning to a rejuvenated South Australian infantry battalion, after having been severely injured at Gallipoli, newly promoted Sergeant Major William Berenger finds himself in the sleepy village of Albert on the Somme on the eve of a massive Australian assault at Pozières. Having married Juliana, whom Berenger had first met 15 years earlier as a Boer prisoner in the South African war, Berenger is called again to the colours, despite the impending birth of their first child.
A young British soldier, Private Reginald Atkins from the Ox and Bucks finds himself trapped in a shell hole in front of the Australian trenches. He is soon joined by an injured Australian, Private Lachlan Watts trying to make his way back to his battalion. Subsequently, both Watts and Atkins are tried for cowardice: the Australian soldier being found Not Guilty, whilst the British soldier is unjustly executed.
Whilst on a night reconnaissance mission in No Man’s Land, Berenger encounters a German soldier from the Bavarian 16th Reserve Infantry Regiment, whom he severely injures but does not kill. Removing this soldier’s identity tags, he discovers upon slithering back to Australian lines, the soldier’s identity as hitherto anonymous aspiring artist, Adolf Hitler.
Berenger discovers that the Germans have been attempting to tunnel under Albert in an attempt to blow-up the Australian lines. Pozières must be taken before the Germans thwart the Allies’ imminent assault.”
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Marelle
The nature of war is that there is no normal; emotions are always running on the surface; fear, hope, sadness and love can all manifest themselves in an instant.
In this setting, four central characters embark upon a daring and extremely dangerous journey through war torn France in 1944. Two French orphaned children have no idea how they will reach what they believe to be their only surviving family. Meanwhile, two Allied prisoners of war escape their captivity, but behind enemy lines they are uncertain about their survival and their ability to get back behind Allied lines.
They each carry a burden of their own personal heart-breaking tragedy as fate brings them together. The sadness and despair from the loss felt by each of them must be overcome if they are to survive. Survival, however, is not guaranteed as each step they take on the journey is fraught with danger.
They soon realise that love and friendship are the most important ingredients to help them reach their personal objectives. Despite the perils they face they demonstrate courage and determination and never lose hope, because as each day passes and with each crisis they face, the bond between the two vulnerable children and the soldiers grows stronger.
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Malory's Grail
The final book in The Malory Trilogy relates how Sir Thomas Malory’s dying wish to see his great work Le Morte D’Arthur safely placed in Winchester Priory is finally fulfilled by his fictional friends. Interwoven with the unfolding story of the manuscript is the historical struggle for the English throne. The dynastic upheavals of the time are inseparable from the journey of Malory’s precious manuscript from prison to print. The action moves between London and Brittany where Henry Richmond is planning his triumphant attack on the usurper, Richard III. Far away in ‘The Other Place’ Sir Tom hears the good news.
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Madam Josefina's Social House
Buenos Aires, 1904. A burgeoning city with a political class dominated by ruthless businessmen, a middle class harbouring disenchanted revolutionaries, and hundreds of thousands of working migrants, amongst whom anarchist ideologies are taking hold.
Commissioner De La Fuente leads the Detective Division of the Police of the Capital. He’s got a strategy to rid the country of radicalized anarchists before their bombs start exploding, and to quell yet another bloody insurrection. He’s also ambitious, willing to do whatever it takes to obtain the exalted position of Chief of Police. He owns Madam Josefina’s Social House, a brothel, taking advantage of the indiscretions of the powerful to gain their support, through blackmail if necessary.
Enter Sofia Montserrat, taking on the job of bookkeeper. She’s an idealistic aristocrat with a secret, writing social critiques for underground newspapers in her spare time. While hiding out from the Spanish authorities she discovers a deadly plot conceived by rogue elements of the police force. She could just let it run its course, but her conscience won’t allow it, and her decisions will have grave repercussions for herself and those she loves.
Madam Josefina’s Social House is a historical thriller, which takes the reader from the sweeping landscapes and enduring poverty of Spain’s rural south to the tenements of metropolitan Buenos Aires. And an inconspicuous brothel, a place of erotic passion and Tango, a place where destinies collide.
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Lysette
Nine year old French girl Lysette is thrown into the chaos of war when she runs for her life from a bomb dropped on her neighbourhood in Aachen, Germany. Travelling through the Netherlands, then a long trek through Belgium, she arrives in the town of Sedan in northern France where she is taken into a monastery. There, she is sheltered from the horrors of war. But outside, the war rages on.
Local resistance groups fight Gestapo soldiers, and secret messages are sent across northern Europe and Belgium Closer to home, the Gestapo are searching for ‘the girl in the blue uniform’ after Lysette had witnessed a murder whilst in the Netherlands. The reality of war is contrasted with the calmness of the monastery. Will Lysette ever see her parents again?
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Liverpool Kids of WWII, Part 2
The boy was growing into youth – not yet a teenager – but was bright enough to know his country was in a war that it mustn’t lose, that his brother and uncles were also part of this deadly struggle…
Melodious harmonies and helmets were heard and seen at the impromptu Christmas party his mum and dad had arranged. He was as inquisitive as could be because it sounded like the Americans had arrived with Uncle Jim for the little house party he’d eavesdropped about over the last few days.
“Gosh a’mighty!” he heard one over-the-pond voice exclaim. “You got gas lighting but no electricity in the house, huh?”
The front room was alive with noise generated by adults, both seated and standing, in a happy conversation. Already, a smoky fuzz was forming from lit cigarettes, held firmly between thumbs and forefingers and used sometimes to emphasise a point or two in the friendly interchange of chit-chat.
The first thing he noticed was one policeman’s helmet and two American army white military police garrison caps grouped together at one end of his mum’s upright piano top. Railway policeman, Uncle Jim was in boisterous good humour with the two Americans.
Suddenly, his young eyes lit up as he spied a crumpled untidy mess of military equipment in the corner of the room, which drew him onto it immediately. He could see a US army belt with what looked like a brown wood baseball bat attached, as well as a set of handcuffs.
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Liverpool Kids of WWII - Part 1
The Liverpool Blitz is over…
The seven-year-old boy who was evacuated in The Green Gates Story, comes home after many months away, and is faced with changes to his life: house moves, new districts, new faces…
No sweets, because Mum’s used the coupons for sugar.
What are bananas?
What’s ice-cream?
White bread?
Upon his return to his home city and with his evacuation experience behind him, he views his life ahead as a series of hurdles, but the War is ongoing…
Toys? – Pretend games and a good healthy imagination.
Free-time? – Fun of collecting waste paper, scrap metal, bones and rags, in support of the war effort.
His first trip into town, shopping with Mum, and the surprising sight of big blackened shells, once shops, now dark spaces between buildings, which had suffered direct hits, torn apart innards and burnt deposits.
Blast waves obliterating shop windows and doors of adjacent buildings, displaying:
Heaps of broken bricks
Shattered concrete supports
Splintered wood floors hanging drunkenly, with massive heaps of dust and debris deposited on the piled remains, awaiting attention and clearance.
How to cope with the unnecessary death of a classmate, killed at play, after accidentally falling through the blitzed roof of an unsafe bomb-damaged house?
When the supply and demands of shortages cause the theft of a family bicycle.
Kids discovering the incomprehensible: German POWs sitting smoking, chatting and laughing, employed in collecting and stacking usable bricks from a bomb site, watched by a grey-haired bespectacled British soldier sat in his parked army lorry when he was not reading a dog-eared copy of Lilliput magazine.
Same kids, frowning and mindful of captured British soldiers packed into overcrowded huts inside barbed-wire enclosures, overlooked by machine-gun towers, in the Fatherland!£3.50 -
Let’s Go Sit Under the Mango Tree
Singapore in 1942 saw the greatest defeat of the British and Allied forces of WW2. Much has been written about the terrible time endured by the 85,000 troops who surrendered to the Japanese forces on 15 February 1942. Much less has been written about the circumstances surrounding the many civilians caught up in the fighting and subsequently interned or forced to endure occupation.
Such was the speed with which the Japanese captured the Island that little time was given to removing resources that may assist them in furthering their aim of creating an Asian empire. One example is the fact that the island had become the centre for all the gold reserves of the Malay States and Singapore. The Japanese knew this and for nearly four years searched the island for the gold. To this day some of this gold may still be at large as no one ever kept a record of what gold was on the island and how much was consumed in paying the cost of the subsequent guerrilla warfare.
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