Charles and Charlie

Charles Stoker, in 1910, is a brilliant young engineer and inventor with a wonderful career before him. Given a unique opportunity by the powerful Collick family to test his inventions and serve his country, he enlists in the Royal Flying Corps. In 1918, Major Stoker returns home to his wife and child, bones and dreams shattered by his experience and refusing any contact with his former life and colleagues.

Only after he is shockingly killed, eight years later, does the distraught Milly Stoker begin to discover the truth about her husband’s war.

In 1928, still numbed by the loss of his father, their innocent son Charlie goes to college, where he is easily led into a student’s life and a student’s sins. When suddenly faced with an agonising crisis, however, like his father he tackles the problem head on… with devastating consequences.

Charles and Charlie is Book One of the Stoker Trilogy.

The Tallyman, Book Two of the set, will be released in 2021.

Blue Sky

A baby girl is found by travelling Cheyenne. A brave and his wife bring Blue Sky up, as if she were their own, and she is happy to be one of the people, even after being told she was born of the white man.

While only in her teens she performs a coup which gives her all she had hoped for, full acceptance into the tribe and a forthcoming wedding to the brave she loves. But a jealous rival has other ideas. She arranges Blue Sky’s abduction telling her mother and father that she has run away.

Blue Sky is taken by an unscrupulous trader to a white man’s town. She is abused and enslaved but eventually finds help in the sheriff and school teacher.

Despite the risks, she comes to the aid of the Indian residents of a nearby reservation and, in so doing, encounters a brave who plots their escape from the town and reservation.

Then begins a long, dangerous and fateful journey home.

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.

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?

Another Time

As the tumultuous tide of the Second World War ebbs, Frank and Amy stand on the precipice of change, their futures hanging in the balance. In the waning days of conflict, this sergeant of the Australian Army and his counterpart, an intrepid Army nurse, are compelled to confront the daunting choices that await them as peace promises to restore normalcy. With the cessation of war comes the inevitability of their separation: Amy yearns to embrace a new beginning in Sydney, with dreams of donning the physician’s coat, while Frank envisions a pastoral life in Tasmania, cultivating world-class Merino wool on his family’s farm. The question that looms over them is one of compromise: can their individual aspirations weave together to form a shared tapestry of life? Their quest for answers is fraught with dilemmas, knowing that each step taken will etch permanent marks on their lives and those of future generations. Spanning half a century, Another Time is a rich tapestry of familial ties, an emotional odyssey through love and loss, fidelity, and betrayal, set against the rapidly shifting moral landscape of the 20th Century, forever altered in the aftermath of conflict.

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.

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 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.

A Life of Breath

Jamie is a respiratory doctor working on the front line. After 12 months without catching the illness himself, he finally gets infected from an unlikely source.

He struggles to come to terms with his own first experiences of the breathlessness that has been the focus of his working life. He also has to reflect on his own potential mortality. Neither are a comfortable ride.

He has had a hugely successful 35-year career, which has taken him to the very top of his specialist field. At the same time, we meet the shy, gauche, and naïve first year doctor, who could never imagine, the achievements ahead. We read the disastrous, humorous, and unbelievable escapades, which mould his career, whilst realising that a successful personal life does not necessarily match, that of the career

The author believes the public has fallen out of love with their medical professionals and in writing this part biography, part fictional account of one doctor’s story, he hopes to put this right. You should laugh, cry and cringe in approximately equal doses, but you might not be able to look your own doctor squarely in the eye, with quite the same perspective, again.