London, 1716. The city is caught in the vice-like grip of a savage winter. Even the Thames has frozen over. But for Jonas Flynt – thief, gambler, killer – the chilling elements are the least of his worries… Justice Geoffrey Dumont has been found dead at the base of St Paul’s cathedral, and a young […]
The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk
Leadenhall Street, London, 1754. Raised amongst the cogs and springs of his father’s workshop, Zachary Cloudesley has grown up surrounded by strange and enchanting clockwork automata. He is a happy child, beloved by his father Abel and the workmen who help bring his father’s creations to life. He is also the bearer of an extraordinary […]
Hawkhurst by Joseph Dragovich
In south-east England in the 1740s war and heated politics bring the old practice of smuggling to new and dangerous heights. Violent gangs of smugglers terrorise communities and confound government attempts to stop them. The most famous of these, the Hawkhurst Gang, operates like a modern drug cartel fuelled by illegal tea. They threaten witnesses […]
Bonny & Read by Julie Walker
The Caribbean, 1720. Two extraordinary women are on the run — from their pasts, from the British Navy and the threat of execution, and from the destiny that fate has written for them. Plantation owner’s daughter, runaway wife, pirate — Anne Bonny has forged her own story in a man’s world. But when she is […]
An Honourable Thief by Douglas Skelton
1715. Jonas Flynt, ex-soldier and reluctant member of the Company of Rogues, a shady intelligence group run by ruthless spymaster Nathaniel Charters, is ordered to recover a missing document. Its contents could prove devastating in the wrong hands. On her deathbed, the late Queen Anne may have promised the nation to her half-brother James, the […]
Hogarth’s Britons by Jacqueline Riding
Hogarth’s Britons explores how the English painter and graphic satirist William Hogarth (1697–1764) set out to define British nationhood and identity at a time of division at home and conflict abroad. With notions of community cohesion, good citizenship and patriotism, wrapped up in a unifying idea of British national character and spirit in all its […]
The Bookseller of Inverness by SG MacLean
After Culloden, Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, […]
Invasion, inoculation and publication: when your book becomes unexpectedly topical
By the time Lucy Ward’s first book, about Catherine II (‘the Great’) of Russia and the fight for inoculation against smallpox, was published, her subject had become unexpectedly topical. Covid and the invasion of Ukraine had turned it from a slightly niche story to one which resonated strongly with our own times. And the echoes […]