A British War Dance

James Ashfield is a young man from Birmingham, sent to Germany to fight alongside his brother in WW2. The events that took place led to his return home with haunting memories he could not erase.

His mind in turmoil, James was left feeling hopeless, until he is given a life-changing opportunity to pursue a dream that had remained his secret since childhood.

Life finally seems to start getting better for James until forbidden love, heartache and a pursuit for revenge turn his whole world upside down once more.

Blowing Away the Bura

In this novel, by October 1991 war in western Croatia between Croats and Serbs is daily and deadly. Navenka Berik, a wimpy 25-year-old Serb mother of two has had her Serb parents and her Croat husband make decisions for her. During the next few months:

- Her father is taken and presumed killed,

- Navenka is raped,

- Her husband is arrested and probably is killed,

- Her mother becomes crippled,

- From the rape, another child is born,

- Remaining family members are on the run as internally displaced persons in the dissolving Yugoslavia,

- The hassled Navenka has to step up and lead.

Unwelcome anywhere, the family languishes with temporary protection visas in Germany. In 1996, they are accepted as refugees in Australia. Peace, the English language and Australia’s very multicultural society bring many new problems. Navenka’s ongoing memories of her husband keep her wishing that he might be alive. Thoughts of moving back to Croatia or to Bosnia end when, briefly, Navenka attends the trial of those accused of murdering her father. There, poverty and the old ethnic prejudices live on. Back in Australia, her long “lost” husband finds her. However, after the initial joy wears off, the terms of his demand, at gunpoint, that his family go and live in Croatia with him are unacceptable. Navenka’s daughter Srebrenka, too young to be burdened by bad memories of Yugoslavia, cleverly resolves the impasse.

People react differently to war. Some think. Some “just feel”.

Crossroads in Time Philby and Angleton A Story of Treachery

A never-before-told account of the infamous relationship between the notorious British spy and Soviet agent Harold “Kim” Philby and the CIA’s Associate Director of Operations for Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Readers will be drawn into the plot and story line of this historical thriller and real-life spy story. It’s an exciting and fast-paced retelling that promises to shine a light on this major moment in the Cold War. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions about the events revealed in this book.

Fleeting Images from a Bloodied Past

Ships against the sea! Was…STILL IS, a threat to all the vessels who sail upon her, and especially so, an ever-present threat to the crews who do their duty and put their lives in harm's way. Of violent storms, tempests… All the unpredictable hell of crosswinds, headwinds and tailwinds, roaring madly like some frenzied monster, changing direction, attempting to plunge the man-made object under the vengeful, towering and swamping thunderous waves, against which so many hardy ships have foundered, perished and been lost. The fact that the CSS Alabama came through such a storm and survived this maelstrom is testimony to the meticulous skills and concentrated painstaking patience and hard work of Laird's well-led and well-managed shipbuilding workforce and professional seamanship, that ensured the crew's safe passage and escape from this seaborne wretchedness. Warships, which survived incredible battle experience, and - at war's end - were reviewed for conversion, replacement or the breaker's yard was a consideration. Not all, however, because the fate of HMS Zealous continued in a new page of history, when she was transferred to the Israeli Navy. Later, in 1967, whilst out on patrol in the Eastern Mediterranean, she was suddenly attacked by Egyptian warships equipped with superior firepower. The new crew of this old warhorse knew that the fate of their emerging and vibrant new nation, fighting to retain her hard-fought existence, was dependent upon their spirited defence. Despite the fact that they were up against Soviet-supplied STYX surface-to-surface missiles, against which they had no defence, they steered into battle, undaunted. With battle pennants flying, they bravely challenged the enemy. Their fearlessness and courage shone in the face of certain destruction and ultimate sacrifice. The Cammell Laird scenario is riveting and strikingly dramatic…

Holes in the Ground: War and Ore

When Thomas Longois Lefoy is sent to Tangiers to investigate a German plot involving Moroccan phosphates, he uncovers a sinister Soviet Union involvement in the Asturias miners’ strike of 1934 and its unforeseen consequences for Andoni Arriola, a Basque metallurgist. As he delves deeper into the case, he finds himself caught in a web of intrigue involving the Spanish Civil War, the injury and death of British intelligence agents, and the protection of Britain’s interests in the iron and copper mining industries. As he travels from Tangiers to Gibraltar, Huelva, and Bilbao, he witnesses the devastating effects of civil war and the destruction of open-cast mining. Along the way, he encounters Heinrich Rathenau, a German industrial chemist seeking refuge, and becomes embroiled in a dangerous game of espionage and political maneuvering that reveals the high stakes of international trade and the human cost of war.

Letters to Doberitz

This unique and compelling story has laid dormant for a 100 years. Inspired by real events and based on my own family during the First World War, Letters to Doberitz is set between a German prison-of-war camp, the battlefields of France and family back in Bristol, as father and son endure very different wars. These were real people. They are my ancestors and family who left an extraordinary tale to be told. A lie is made in the name of love, with letters written compounding the deceit for years, all to protect the man that they loved. This is their truly unique story.

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!

Stigmata of Auschwitz

The Stigmata of Auschwitz is the brief story of the life and love of Rebekah and Gabriel.

The two main characters of the story are a young Jewish couple whose lives bringing up their young child are cut short and sacrificed to an evil Nazi ideology.

The story takes place between March 1938 to September 1941, in the time of the Shoah (the Holocaust).

Gabriel is from Budapest in Hungary, where he is sent on a mission to Munkács in Western Ukraine. There he meets Rebekah. They fall in love, marry and settle in Munkács, where the population is 42% Jewish.

In Munkács Gabriel and Rebekah build up a successful business and public life: he becomes a councillor representing the Jewish community, while she is a member of the Union of Jewish Women. To complete their enviable lifestyle, they have a much-loved baby son.

But their dream is destroyed by the antisemitism unleashed at the outbreak of the Second World War; their life together is ruined by the ruling fascist elite. Consequently, they have departed to Auschwitz, where they are murdered.

However, their two-year-old son is rescued and raised by their neighbour.

The Cedars of Beckenham

The Mystery of an Antique German Doll reunites members of a family torn apart during The Third Reich of Nazi Germany.

This family saga, starting in the leafy suburb of Beckenham on the borders of Kent and London, begins in 1930 in the comfortable world of four British upper-middle class families blind to the impending changes that are about to threaten not only their world, but everyone else’s world, too.

A doll belonging to the Abuthnott family becomes the catalyst that brings about two sides of the Rubenstein family, who were able to escape from Germany in the late 1930s finding refuge in the United States of America and in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Along the way, the horrors of the Blitz and the British struggle for survival are enacted out against the parallel Germanic horror of holocaust separation. The survivors in the United States, Great Britain and Israel adapt to a new world as it unfolds through the second half of the 20th century, until by the chance sale of a German Biedermeier doll at Sotheby’s in New York, their separate paths are brought together in 2017.

The four Beckenham families adapt to their changing lifestyles witnessing a rich tapestry of 20th century history taking the reader all over the world with its beauty, passion and prejudices.

The Munich Pursuit

Fiction based on fact, this a story of the search by the Germans and British to establish how far the other has reached in the development of a jet-engined fighter plane prior to WW2. In UK, the Germans use a dissident South-African-born engineer who lost both parents in the Boer War and harbours a resentment against the British government. Dogged police work eventually exposes him. In Germany, the British lose their experienced agent and are forced to use two reserve officers to fill the gap. The two are discovered by the German Security Forces in the act of taking photographs. They are forced to flee across Germany and France with their information, the Germans in hot pursuit. The German Security operatives have orders to kill them and retrieve the photographs. The Munich Crisis of 1938 with the threat of war causes travel chaos and in part, hinders both sides in the pursuit.

Transcendence

Captured at Gallipoli on 25 April, 1915, Sergeant Berenger, an uncompromising professional soldier, escapes Turkish imprisonment. He enlists the assistance of three unlikely co-conspirators: Ali, a simple Arab boy forcibly drafted into the Ottoman army with his brother, Mohammad; and Avraham, a Jewish merchant, who determines his future is no longer with the Ottoman Empire. Pursued by the sadistic Tolga from the Turkish prison at Fort Kilitbahir, Berenger discovers the date of the Turkish counter-attack on ANZAC positions. Berenger must return to the ANZAC lines to deliver the intelligence that a massive Turkish counter-attack will commence on 19 May 1915; and he must slip through Mustafa Kemal's 57th Turkish Regiment in order to do so.

Treasures of War

Leningrad, 1941.

Germany’s Operation Barbarossa is tightening its noose around the city. The Neva River and Lake Ladoga freeze. Few supplies reach the city. Thousands suffer from cold and starvation.

Katuska and Nina Koslov, young daughters of a dedicated museum employee, shelter in the basement of the great Hermitage Museum—once the palace of Tsars. As insulation to meagre coats, their mother sews ‘found’ canvases into the linings.

Upon the death of their parents, the girls begin a new chapter in their lives with the hidden paintings cherished as mementos of parental love.

We accompany Katuska and Nina on an obstacle-filled journey through war and its challenging aftermath. We accompany the ‘found’ paintings, also known to some as ‘stolen art’, on journeys through Europe, England, the US and the Soviet Union.