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The Book and the Knife
28th November, 2024
A novel set around a powerful medieval book which reaches England and becomes caught up in the struggle between its two leading families, and the events leading up to the Norman invasion of 1066. A book that is so powerful and linked to a foretelling so inescapable that it will put a new ruler on a throne but which ruler and what country?
How it all started…
I’ve always loved to write and I wrote short stories, would–be radio plays and poetry before I decided I had a novel in me… or two, three or four.
Taking you to Anglo-Saxon England – and to Normandy
Having worked in the countryside of Sussex and Kent, seeing in the woods and hedges, the fields and farms of these ancient landscapes the traces of Anglo-Saxon England all around me, it was no surprise that I’d write historical fiction. It’s a world I wanted to bring to life, with the manor of Berewic where the Godwins hold power and Eadric struggles, and the vast woodland of the Andredswald where the charcoal burners live. I’ve done a bit of work in Normandy too… and so to the Cotentin where Gilbert is forest warden to the Dukes of Normandy and Felip builds the abbey of Cerisy. I love weaving my fictional characters around the landscapes I know as much as around the real figures from history.
Taking the story into battle
Living 25 miles from the Battle of Hastings site, the events of 1066 were a magnet for me and for The Book and the Knife series of novels. Running through them all is the story of two families locked in a 50-year feud that reaches a climax on the day of the battle. At its heart I had a vision of two young people, fugitives whose future and that of their country has been devastated in a single terrible day. Theirs is not just a physical journey; thrown together, they must learn that their differences are the strengths they need in each other. But these two people will only just be born at the end of Thegn of Berewic, Part One of the series, because there are important questions about what happens in the years leading up to 1066.
Everything begins and ends at its given time
What happens in England, where the feud between the two families in Berewic is both part of and mirrors the real Game of Thrones struggle between the houses of Godwin and Wessex? What happens in Normandy, where William, later Conqueror at Hastings, is in a real House of the Dragon fight to secure his succession? What if it isn’t a given that a Wessex, Godwin or a Norman will take the crown of England in 1066, or keep it if they do? And so to Spain and Toledo where Samra lives, where a knife has been inscribed with a foretelling, and Sophia tells the guardians of a book of knowledge that a new ruler will arise. Everything begins and ends at its given time. In Thegn of Berewic, it all begins.
