Blood-Eagle Saga

Deep frozen midwinter in a Viking warlord’s longhouse. From the snow emerges a white-haired saga-teller, Snorri, who offers to entertain the drunken warband.

Sven Ravenfeeder agrees – but drops a noose around Snorri’s neck and tells him: “If we like your story, you will live...”

So begins the Blood-Eagle Saga – a tale of greed and betrayal, courage and cowardice, that takes rival Viking longships across the Atlantic to a new world of depravity.

In the menacing forests and on the vast bison-rich plains, Viking enemies Grim and his former right-hand man Asgeir battle over honour and treasure. Along the way, they find themselves in another equally proud and brutal warrior culture, that of the native Americans.

Throughout Asgeir is helped by his muse, Mary, a shape-shifting former Irish slave who has every reason to hate Grim.

At the heart of the saga is one burning question that sends Sven and his men into a frenzy – who will be the victim of the Vikings’ favourite torture – The Blood-Eagle?

Blood on Their Hands

Algy Foster and Graham Murrell grew up in the diverse and vibrant community of Tiger Bay, a world-renowned neighbourhood in Cardiff. Algy’s parents were part of the Windrush generation, immigrants from the Caribbean who made their home in the Docks area of Cardiff. Graham’s grandfather, who also immigrated from Barbados in order to fight in the First World War, married a Welsh woman who owned a boarding house in Tiger Bay. Both men, who are of black and mixed-race heritage, respectively, have faced racism and prejudice throughout their lives. As they near the end of their careers in education, they set out on a journey to uncover the root causes of prejudice in society.

Blood on Their Hands is a fictionalized account inspired by the real-life experiences of Algy and Graham, offering a unique and thought-provoking perspective on contemporary political debates around race and inequality.

Black Hearts and Blue Devils

A tale of six country orphans uprooted and transplanted into a dark world of soot and smoke. They have no choice but to adapt, none more successfully than big brother Abe, now a respected police sergeant in confident control of the rough streets of the Black Country in the 1880s, ready for anything the world can throw at him. Or so he believes. Because something else comes his way, something extraordinary, and not of this world, and he is certainly not ready for that.

Abraham Lively’s world is turned inside out, as he battles the forces aligned against him: black-hearted villains marshalled by non-human entities. He is sure that there are devils at work. He knows so because the locals have seen them. And they are blue. Blue Devils.

If that was not enough to contend with, he has made an enemy of a little man who will prove to be the greatest adversary of them all: a criminal yes, but pleasant enough, as sociopaths go; but dangerous, as sociopaths also often go. And Abe, tying himself up in mental knots, with his own devils, does not appreciate that danger until it is too late.

Will events conspire to destroy him? Or will he banish the darkness within himself, to return to the light, his true self, his family, his sanity?

Sons and Lovers meets Ripper Street meets Dennis Wheatley – you will not want to miss this!

Approach by Stealth

It’s 1942 and a fleet of German mini-submarines are loose in the Mediterranean wreaking havoc on Allied shipping, sinking urgently required supplies destined for Malta and Alexandria and the new invasion beachhead in Algeria, thus jeopardising the squeezing of Rommel out of North Africa.

Awaiting an ETA regarding a large American convoy, they are re-arming and refuelling at their base in Vichy France near the Spanish border.

Can the British commandos en route in motor gunboats reach the port in time to destroy the vessels or will they fall foul from information supplied by a suspected spy at the War Office in London and die like so many Special Operations Executives, agents and resistance fighters in various recent missions?

Perhaps the best chance of success lies with S.O.E.’s secretly arranged mission involving their French agent Pierre Duvalle, seconded to a special boat section of the Royal Marines and transferred by submarine to within striking distance with five experienced and lethally efficient men of that elite force. Three two-man folboat canoes would see them to their target.

But what does the informer in London know? Will Duvalle, who has a very sad and personal reason to see him exposed, find a chink in the spy’s armour?

An Impossible Quest

In this story set in the ‘Dark Ages’ of British history, two brothers – twins Alfred and Leofric – help win a tribal conflict, but faced with ‘a fate worse than death’, they take to the road. They are seeking adventure and fame and are faced with opposition when Alfred falls in love with a beautiful (aren’t they all?) princess. He is challenged to complete a quest to prove he is worthy of her. That’s when the difficulties begin.

An Adoration of Beauty

Darius Bukhari, lecturer of Renaissance Art at The Courtauld Institute of Fine Art in London, is left with a mystery after the visit of Judith St John James, who brings him letters from long ago concerning the disappearance of a painting by famed Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli.

Back in the 15th century, Botticelli creates a wondrous new painting in his artist’s studio in Florence. The painting, the first copy of The Birth of Venus, is overpainted, stolen and vanishes.

In London of the mid-Victorian era, two young men – Dr Thomas Fielding, physician to the elite, and Viscount Dearly, famed poet and forebear of Judith – set out for Italy to follow in the footsteps of the Romantic poets. They end up in a dingy Roman junk shop where they make an extraordinary discovery.

Following their return to London, Tom Fielding, chased by a criminal gang, is forced to leave England immediately, taking the painting with him. He travels through Central Africa with Dr David Livingstone and then once more the painting disappears.

Finally, Darius and Judith embark on a journey through Africa attempting to discover the final resting place of the missing painting.

A Window on the Past

Sherlock, an egocentric businessman in Los Angeles in 2011, is about to fire his secretary, Sophie. But when he walks into an elevator in the skyscraper he works in, he finds himself travelling back in time to the moment when the first plane is about to hit World Trade Center One on September 9, 2001. His actions during the tragedy in the famous Windows on the World restaurant transform him into a man who is caring and heroic.

This gripping story is about those people who were left to die, and how an interloper from the future succeeded in saving a few. It is, most importantly, about the brave efforts of those who struggled to save the people in the towers, and the challenges they faced on this horrible day in New York City.

A Walk in "Wild" Wales with George Borrow

In his Welsh classic, Borrow provides an account of his walk from Llangollen to Swansea in 1856, a walk which at the time would have been a pursuit of epic proportions. Borrow’s literary musings, historical anecdotes and experiences along the way, presented in the form of a journal, provide an insight to Welsh life as it was in the middle of the 19th Century.

In a world immersed in the industrial revolution, Borrow was undoubtedly struck by the magnitude and pace of change that was happening around him. But it would not have been evident to him that the world could be anything like it is today. A world without motor cars, no electricity, no telephones, no aeroplanes, no police force anything like we know it today and the wonders of a technological revolution that has turned the world on its head not even a figment of the imagination, that was the world of Borrow.

A Walk in “Wild” Wales with George Borrow compares Borrow’s Wales with Wales today and captures events that have impacted on towns that Borrow passed through and some of the characters they have produced who have helped shape a Welsh culture built on a unique language and a hardiness of spirit descendant from its farming and mining heritage.  

A Time in Paris

In the sweltering Indian summer of 1870, a young Englishman is sent to Paris as Prussian invaders advance on the French capital with the largest siege army ever assembled. The City of Light is cut off from the outside world, the population trapped behind its tall ramparts. As the siege continues for a month, then a second, a hungering third, a frozen fourth and into a starved fifth, the Englishman, a stock young gentleman of his Victorian times, falls in love with a radical French enchantress who by chance saves his hide. The lovers’ fate is entwined with those of a tormented French general appointed to defend Paris and an impatient Prussian grandee (Otto von Bismarck) hell-bent on bringing the ‘capital of civilisation’ to its knees. The unlikely love story turns upon true events that have shaken our world through to the present.

Praise for David Lawday’s recent book Danton: Giant of the French Revolution:

“Spirited and highly readable… Lawday creates some great set pieces and striking turning points… He is able to capture the atmosphere of the early revolution: its inflammable mix of devilment and righteousness, reckless selflessness and flagrant self-promotion. He sees that Danton was more than the sum of his crimes, the sum of his secrets; he celebrates his ‘large heart and violent impulses in an irresolvable conflict’.”

Hilary Mantel, The London Review of Books.

A Senseless Death in a Dying Republic

A young man, Justinian, is setting out to join the Roman army during a period of bitter tensions during the last years of the Roman republic. His enlistment gets off to a bad start when he loses contact with his fellow soldiers while on a march. A chance meeting with a young woman sets off a series of events which lead to criminal charges of desertion and malicious killing.

Set during the turbulent times of the Marian and Sulla civil war, A Senseless Death in a Dying Republic is a gripping story of lost dreams and a disregard for human life. The novel features historical characters such as Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Cicero and Catalina.

A Raven's Calling

This story begins in the small village of Louisbourg, Nova-Scotia and finds its way to the village of Perce, Quebec, where Celine brings the truth to light.

We have a man, Tomas, found dead, washed up on a lonely beach and a woman, Celine, who comes from afar to begin a new life miles away in the historical village of Louisbourg. What do these two lives have in common? When Celine leaves her life of over fifty years in Ontario, to start a new chapter for herself she finds the truth about Tomas and how and why he was found, dead, on a beach many miles away from Louisbourg where he worked as a night watchman at the fortress of Louisbourg. Celine, his replacement, finishes what Tomas had begun until his mysterious death. Now the truth is in the hands of two countries. What will come from this new truth? Will history be rewritten? Was a life given up for love or truth?

A Mind Behind

Embark on an extraordinary journey alongside Laura as she ventures from the shores of England to the vibrant landscapes of Italy.

Set against the backdrop of Italy’s struggle for independence, A Mind Behind unravels the compelling story of one woman’s courageous odyssey.