Authors & Books

Available to option

‘Housekeeper or housewife?’ the soldier asks Silvana as she and eight-year-old Aurek board the ship that will take them from Poland to England at the end of the war, to Janusz, her husband. But she isn’t sure any longer that she is a wife of any kind or whether she has a house. After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret that she is now bringing back to her husband, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors.   In Ipswich, Janusz is getting ready for the arrival of the wife and son he hasn't seen in six years. After fleeing Poland and the war that left him a deserter, he has found his family a house. He works hard planting a proper English garden to welcome them and to distract him from his own secret.   But the six years apart have changed them all, and they must learn that love can't work unless there are no secrets. To make Aurek a real home, Silvana and Janusz will have to come to terms with what happened to them during the war, accept that each have changed immeasurably and allow their beloved but wild son to be who he truly is. With echoes of Small Island and Sophie’s Choice, 22 Britannia Road is a powerful novel of acceptance, survival and love.  

Publication date: April 2011

Available to option

(First in series. Bloomsbury 2010) Iggy is an Urk. The Urks are a warlike race with bushy beards and hairy legs – especially some of the women. Urks like boulder-rolling and chasing lizards. They also like the Feast of Urks – when Urk boys must pass the Testing to become warriors. But Iggy isn’t like other Urks. He likes inventing things. Which is why he has been neglecting his axe-wielding practice. So it’s unfortunate for him that the Testing involves tackling a large snake – using an axe. And that’s how the story begins. With a VERY large snake. And an axe. And hopefully, a cunning invention.

Avilable to option

The new novel from the bestselling author of THE SIXTH WIFE. 'England: firelight and fireblush; wine-dark, winking gemstones and a frost of pearls. Wool as soft as silk, in leaf-green and moss; satins glossy like a midsummer night or opalescent like winter sunrise. Little did we know it but that night we were already ghosts in our own lives.' When twelve-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk's household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious of her. The two girls couldn't be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it's Cat in whom Katherine confides and, despite herself, Cat is drawn to her. Summoned to court at seventeen, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious, love affair. Within months, the king has set aside his Dutch wife Anne for Katherine. The future seems assured for the new queen and her maid-in-waiting, although Cat would feel more confident if Katherine hadn't embarked on an affair with one of the king's favoured attendants, Thomas Culpeper. However, for a blissful year and a half, it seems that Katherine can have everything she wants. But then allegations are made about her girlhood love affairs. Desperately frightened, Katherine recounts a version of events which implicates Francis but which Cat knows to be a lie. With Francis in the Tower, Cat alone knows the whole truth of Queen Katherine Howard - but if she tells, Katherine will die.

Available to option

'Went out, got pissed. Same shit, different day.' Aberalaw, a tiny South Wales valley village where nobody ever arrives and nobody ever leaves. The new police chief has declared war on recreational drugs, resulting in an eighteen-month drought. The party-loving wives and girlfriends of local punk band, The Boobs, are getting desperate, both for drugs and thrills: Ellie, factory girl with dreams of a better life in New York; Rhiannon, hairdresser with a taste for violence and designer clothes and Sian, unappreciated, obsessive compulsive mother of three. Into their lives, enter the languid dark stranger, Johnny: Englishman, drug dealer and shameless seducer. In the space of just a few months, three women's lives will be changed forever. Prize-winning writer, Rachel Trezise, dissects the morals and mores of a small Welsh village community with a scalpel-sharp pen and an incisive wit.

Available to option

The Viking King Authun leads his men on a raid against an Anglo-Saxon village. Men and women are killed indiscriminately but Authun demands that no child be touched. He is acting on prophecy. A prophecy that tells him that the Saxons have stolen a child from the Gods. If Authun, in turn, takes the child and raises him as an heir, the child will lead his people to glory. But Authun discovers not one child, but twin baby boys. Ensuring that his faithful warriors, witness to what has happened, die during the raid Authun takes the children and their mother home, back to the witches who live on the troll wall. And he places his destiny in their hands. And so begins a stunning multi-volume fantasy epic that will take a werewolf from his beginnings as the heir to a brutal viking king, down through the ages. It is a journey that will see him hunt for his lost love through centuries and lives, and see the endless battle between the wolf, Odin and Loki - the eternal trickster - spill over into countless bloody conflicts from our history, and over into our lives. This is the myth of the werewolf as it has never been told before and marks the beginning of an extraordinary new fantasy series from Gollancz.

Available to option

“Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest, moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother’s favourite. And he was a murderer.”  

B.B. is a forty-two-year-old hospital porter still living at home with his mother in a Yorkshire village.  His social life is played out online, on a website called badguysrock.  There he stalks Albertine, with whom he shares a troubled past, and spins dark murder fantasies - especially about his mother.  As the story of their tortured relationship unravels, so does that of his blood feud with his brothers, the poignant tale of a blind child prodigy, and the poisonous truth lurking in the rotting heart of one disturbed family.    Blueeyedboy is an intricately plotted thriller that plays on the myriad opportunities for disguise, multiple personalities and mind games that are offered by the internet and shows, in a cascade of heartstopping twists, how a fantasy life can erupt into the real world with unpredictable and devastating results.

Available to option

Margaret Forster, in this engaging, intriguing novel, about a young woman and two grandmothers, uncovers the shocking truths that family history reveals. The curiously named Isamay, a would-be academic, is trying to write a coherent thesis about grandmothers in history - from Sarah Bernhardt and George Sand to the matriarchal Queen Victoria and other influential grannies - while constantly ambushed by the secrets her own family has been keeping. An only child, she is named after her grandmothers, Isa and May, who were there at her birth and who have formed and influenced her in very different ways. Jealous of each other, they both want to be first in their granddaughter's affections. Isa has an edge, in that young Isamay looks like her, but Isa's reserved and elegant exterior hides startling surprises that could undermine her granddaughter's certainties. May, on the other hand, is plump, indomitable and opinionated, and it's from her that Isamay inherits her stubborn determination. Isamay, almost thirty, has never wanted children, but suddenly considers changing her mind. Her live-in lover, Ian (always mysterious about his own family history) is sure that he does not want a child. Engrossing, set in the present but with hooks into the past, this is an unusual story about grandmothers and their potentially powerful role in family life, about nature vs nurture, bloodlines and bridges across generations.

Available to option

Adrian Mole is 39 and a quarter. Unable to afford the mortgage on his riverside apartment, he has been forced to move into a semi-detached converted pigsty next door to his parents, George and Pauline. His ravishing wife Daisy loathes the countryside, longs for Dean Street and has yet to buy a pair of Wellingtons; they are both aware the passion has gone out of their marriage, but neither knows how to reignite the flame. To cap it all off, Adrian is leaving his bed numerous times a night to go to the lavatory and has other alarming symptoms, leading him to suspect prostate trouble. Meanwhile, his mother thinks that an appearance on the Jeremy Kyle show might solve the mystery of her daughter’s paternity once and for all. And when George is asked to provide a DNA sample, will the shock kill him? He is already disabled, though still chain smoking and has had an ashtray welded onto the arm of his wheelchair. As Adrian’s worries multiply, a phone call to his old flame Dr Pandora Braithwaite, BA, MA, PhD, MP and Junior Minister in the Foreign Office, ignites memories of a shared passion and makes him wonder – is she the only one who can save him now?

The Hawkwood trilogy (Ratcatcher, Resurrectionist and Rapscallion) featuring the ultimate ‘Period James Bond’ Matthew Hawkwood is now available for option.

Ratcatcher: Hunting down highwaymen was not the usual preserve of a Bow Street Runner.  As the most resourceful of this elite band of investigators, Matthew Hawkwood was surprised to be assigned the case – even if it did involve the murder and mutilation of a naval courier.  Soon Hawkwood finds himself pursuing a trail that leads him from the squalor of St Giles Rookery, London’s notorious den of thieves and cutthroats, to the brightly lit salons of the aristocracy and the heart of the British Government.  But it is only with the discovery of a corpse on the banks of the Thames that the true agenda behind the robbery begins to emerge and a dark conspiracy is revealed.  Napoleon’s agents are preparing to launch an assassination attempt that will turn the tide of the war – and only Hawkwood can stop them. 

Available to option

'There were many staff at Kensington Palace, fulfilling many roles; a man who was employed to catch rats, another whose job it was to sweep the chimneys. That there was someone expected to hunt Demons did not shock the new Queen; that it was to be her was something of a surprise.' London, 1838. Queen Victoria is crowned; she receives the orb, the sceptre, and an arsenal of blood-stained weaponry. Because if Britain is about to become the greatest power of the age, there's the small matter of the demons to take care of first...But rather than dreaming of demon hunting, it is Prince Albert who occupies her thoughts. Can she dedicate her life to saving her country when her heart belongs elsewhere? With lashings of glistening entrails, decapitations, and foul demons, this masterly new portrait will give a fresh understanding of a remarkable woman, a legendary monarch, and quite possibly the best Demon Hunter the world has ever seen ...A E Moorat weaves a seamlessly lurid tapestry of royal biography, gothic horror and fist-gnawing comedy as he lifts the veil on what really took place on the dark and cobbled streets of 19th-century England  

Optioned

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.

Optioned to Element Films. To be adapted and directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was one of them; he commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900,000 people. Aiming to discover how human beings were turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil, Gitta Sereny investigates Stangl's mind, and the influences which shaped him. Having talked to him for weeks and conducted months of research, she portrays the man as he saw himself and as he was seen by others, including his wife.

Optioned to Fox Studios

After a nasty incident with a goat, the Troll family are forced to leave there native Norway and make a new home somewhere else. Unfortunately they choose the quiet suburb of Biddlesden. Faced with the prospect of ‘Baked Bean’ for dinner, and the awful spectre of ‘The Shower’, things are going to get ugly (and possibly hairy and smelly, too). But worst of all, they are moved next door to the Priddle family. Big mistake.

Available to option

Johannes Cabal, a brilliant scientist and notorious snob, is obsessed with raising the dead. Tormented by a dark and harrowing secret, he travels to the fiery pits of hell to retrieve his soul, long ago sold to the Devil. Satan, incredibly bored and hungry for a challenge, proposes a little wager: Johannes has one year to persuade one hundred people to sign over their souls or he will lose his forever. To keep things interesting, he generously throws in a traveling carnival to help Johannes collect on the bargain. With little time to lose, Johannes raises a crew from the dead and enlists his brother, Horst, a charismatic vampire, to be his right-hand man. Once on the road, Johannes and his troupe of reprobates cause mayhem at every stop. But are his tricks enough to beat the Devil at his own game?

Available to option

Published by MacMillan, 2006 It is 1940. The Spanish Civil War is over, and Madrid lies ruined, its people starving, while the Germans continue their relentless march through Europe. And as Britain stands alone, General Franco considers whether to abandon neutrality and enter the war. Into this uncertain world comes Harry Brett, ex-public schoolboy, traumatised veteran of Dunkirk and, now, reluctant spy for the British Secret Service. Sent to gain the confidence of Sandy Forsyth, an old school friend turned shady Madrid businessman, he finds himself involved in a dangerous game - and surrounded by memories. Meanwhile Sandy's girlfriend, ex-Red Cross nurse Barbara Clare, is engaged on a secret mission of her own – to find her former lover Bernie Piper, whose passion for the Communist cause led him into the International Brigades, and who vanished on the bloody battlefields of the Jarama. In Winter in Madrid C.J. Sansom brilliantly conjures with delicate tipping points in history, using their complexities to throw his characters into morally fraught situations. The result is a gripping novel of spies, greed and betrayal.

Optioned to Big Fish Films

Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, is troubled by his estrangement from his daughter and struggling with the consequences of his infidelities. Francis Gilroy, veteran Republican and recently appointed government minister, risks losing what feels tantalisingly close to his grasp. In America, Danny and his girlfriend plan for the arrival of their first child, happily oblivious to what is about to pull him back to Belfast and rupture the life they have started together. Retired detective James Fenton, on his way to an orphanage in Romania with a van full of supplies, will soon be forced to confront what he has come to think of as his betrayal, years before, of a teenage boy.

In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men's lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. In a community where truth is often tribal and partial, the secret they share threatens to destroy what they have each built in the present. David Park pieces together these individual stories to create a powerful tale that transcends both time and place. Moving, insightful and utterly involving, The Truth Commissioner is an important novel from one of Ireland's greatest writers.

Available to option

Ever wished you could swap your mum? Be careful what you wish for … Mum Trouble! Oli wants to swap his mum for someone who'll let him eat loads of pepperoni pizza and watch Real Blood Bath Murders on telly. Mother 44 drives a tank and trains secret agents. But she's also hatching an evil anti-children plot – and she's looking for a boy to help. When the Mum Shop's Matcher puts them together, it's trouble!

The Dalgleish series is available for option.