As readers will know, much of my time recently has been put into getting The Flame Before Us ready for publication. It is now available for Kindle pre order at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon India, and elsewhere. The softcover version is going through the last stages of production and will be available at round about the same time.

But outside that I have been involved with a range of other things. One that I was particularly pleased to take part in was a contribution to Suzanne Adair’s “Relevant History” blog. Entitled Stamped on these Lifeless Things, it was an exploration of early writing. A lot of fun to write, and judging from the comments, readers enjoyed it too. One lucky reader got a free copy of In a Milk and Honeyed Land which at the time of writing has just successfully made its way across the Atlantic.

There are a few reviews which have appeared on other sites recently –

Historical Novel Society

• The Queen of Washington (Francis Hamit) – spies and intrigue during the American Civil War.
• Will Poole’s Island (Tim Weed) – again in America, but this time in the early colonial days, exploring different interactions between the settlers and original inhabitants.
• Turwan (Richard J Carroll) – over to Australia and a fact-based account of one man’s relationship with aboriginal groups.

The last two had a lot of points of similarity, setting personal cross-cultural friendship in contrast to a background of social prejudice.

The Review Group

• Splintered Energy (Arlene Webb) – a near-future first contact science fiction book taking a different approach to the subject. This book is only the first in a series of four, so is far from complete at the end – plenty of material for enthusiasts to get their teeth into.

All of the above reviews are live at the sites indicated, and will be making their way onto Amazon and elsewhere shortly.

Other books – reviews planned but not yet written –

• Camp Follower (Suzanne Adair) – again in the US, exploring military actions and intrigue in North and South Carolina in the War of Independence. I am slowly getting my head around the twists and turns of American history. I am part-way through Suzanne’s Hostage to Heritage at the moment, also exploring the same context from a different perspective.
• Lincoln at Gettysburg (Garry Willis) – not a work of fiction, but rather an analysis of the rhetorical and social background to Lincoln’s speech. As a non-American I found this fascinating, particularly the place in American thought of this and other early documents, in contrast to our own British attitude to things like Magna Carta.
• The Oblate’s Confession – monastic life in Northumbria after the synod of Whitby, tackling both personal and religious life.

Plenty of excitement there…