For the Crown by Susan Appleyard

Today Jen Black reviews For the Crown: Pride and Honour in the Wars of the Roses by Susan Appleyard. The author has very kindly offered an e-book as a giveaway.  To be in with a chance of winning this wonderful prize, simply leave a comment below or on our Facebook page.

Good luck!

For those who like their romance medieval and with humour. Robbie, Bastard of Ovedale, is a warden of the East March of Scotland. Chasing Scottish raiders across the border is his life’s work and his love. On one such jaunt, he goes after a youth who has wounded his friend, only to discover that the youth is a girl, Mary Margaret Douglas. His mortification is complete when she renders him immobile by the application of pressure to a sensitive spot. Once he has regained control of the situation, he realises that his best option is to keep the red-haired virago with him until he can ransom her back to her family. The problem is her brothers don’t want her. That’s just one of the problems. Another is that Robbie is beginning to like her, but worst of all is the question of what to do with her now. 

Robbie is summoned to war. He has to take the Scottish lass with him, but she is disruptive because she inspires the men to lust, including the despicable Lord Clifton who wants her for himself – at least for a week or two – and will stop at nothing, including murder, to get what he wants. Robbie’s father and his overlord, the Earl of Northumberland, want him to get rid of her, but it’s too late for that. Although he doesn’t know it, Robbie is falling in love.

For the Crown: Pride and Honour in the Wars of the Roses by Susan Appleyard is a novel set amidst the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses and the landscape of the Marches between Northumberland and Scotland. The narrative is rich in detail and atmosphere.

"Robbie shot a glance at broad, homely Jonas. "They think they're safe."

"Easy pickings,"  Joans said. "Let's get on with it."

They snaked backwards on elbows and knees until they could no longer see, or be seen by, the Scots, and returned to where the rest of the men were waiting, far enough back that their horses' whickering wouldn't expose their presence.

It had been an unusually wet summer and autumn, resulting in roads being washed oout, bridges and mills destroyed by swollen rivers, and streams bursting their banks. Wagons became bogged down; horses nad men slogged through the gluey mud. A prudent traveller tested the depth of a pool that lay across the road before wading into it. In low lying land, teh upper half of farmsteads could be seen in the midst of what appeared to be a lake. Pastures and fields were under sheets of water, so the crops rotted, ad vegetable patches were ruined. Even the harvest of fruit and berries had been poor. It was a disaster England had not experienced in a hundred years and compounded her miseries.

To make matters worse, it promised to be a bitter winter. The journey so far had been accompanied by howling winds and frigid temperatures. The night before, there had been a little snow, just enough to leave a thin layer on the ground, but Robbie could see more snow in the clouds billowing in from the east.

They set off to find a path down the glen that wouldn't risk the legs of their mounts and emerged beside the river sometime  later. Making no further move to keep quiet, they spurred their horses over the uneven ground and bore down on the Scots, screaming like demons and waving their weapons in the air."

 

The story opens in 1460 on the Scottish side of the border with England as the English under the leadership of Robbie Ovedale ambush a party of Scots. He suffers at the hands of a young man who turns out to be a young Scots woman named Mary Douglas. Thinking to ransom her back to her family he takes her captive, but once home, discovers the rather inconvenient truth that her brothers do not wish to have her returned.
Propinquity ensures a romance between these two young people but it is a very slow and steady thing, developing gradually through the novel.

The author, I feel, has enriched the story with the detailed history and politics of the time, over which she has a sure grasp, and more than one battle is described in generous detail.
I confess I chose this novel because of the Northumberland setting, but regretfully found little of the county beyond a few place names. There are some typographical errors, none of which spoil the story.

The writing is very good, and many will enjoy the leisurely tale. I give it 4 stars!

About the author: Susan Appleyard was born in England, which is where she learned to love English history, and now lives in Canada in the summer with my three children and six grandchildren. In winter she and her husband flee the cold for Mexico. Writing will always be her first love followed by, in no particular order, painting, swimming, dancing, and tequila sunrises on the beach. 

                   

Links: 

Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=Susan+Appleyard

Author page at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Susan-Appleyard/e/B00UTVMT5Y 

Blog: www.susanappleyardwriter.wordpress.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/susan.appleyard.9
Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Mexisue1 

About the Reviewer: Jen Black an ex-academic library manager who lives in the Tyne valley, north east England, with my husband and 6 year-old Dalmatian. She came to writing late, and stay fit (sort of) roaming about Northumberland with her dog. It is a wonderful county for history lovers (and dog walkers!). Everyone knows about the Roman Wall, Vindolanda and all their wonderful Roman finds, but it is equally amazing for castles, bastles, fortified farms and the occasional peel tower. Jen has walked and ridden over a good deal of it. The wall is barely five miles away from her home and she has met people of all nationalities walking there. Jen take lots of pics when out and pops them on her blog. When she write she's not out to enlighten, but to entertain and she's always going to have a happy ending. She may have a few tragedies and deaths along the way, but the ending will always be upbeat.

Jen doesn’t play music as she never notices when it stops, so can’t be listening, can she?

Her blog is at http://jenblackauthor.blogspot.com

Facebook: Friends of Jen Black 

https://www.facebook.com/jen.black.775

and on Twitter: @JENBLACKNCL

Diana talks to ... Antoine Vanner

 

I was lucky enough to chat with Antoine over far too many olives at the HNS16 conference in September. What a charming man he is!  I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions...
        Antoine's latest book came out on 20th October and has received some wonderful reviews. You may buy the book here .

Alternatively, Antoine is very generously donating a copy of the book as a prize!!! To be in with a chance to win a paper copy of this book, please leave a comment here on the blog, or on our Review page.  The names will all go into the hat and the first one drawn on 27th November will be the winner!!

 
Q.   Antoine, if your latest book, Britannia’s Amazon, was adapted into a TV show or a film, who would you like to play the lead role?

A.    You’re putting me in an embarrassing position here! Florence Dawlish is the wife of Royal Navy captain Nicholas Dawlish, who had played the lead in four previous books. Florence played major roles in two of them – Britannia’s Wolf and Britannia’s Shark – but now, in Britannia’s Amazon, set in 1882, she has a whole book to herself. She’s the type of woman I admire – clever, courageous, loyal, compassionate and resourceful. She is however not a beauty and she knows it. In Britannia’s Amazon, in which she has to adopt another persona, “it was somehow disappointing when she saw her reflection in the wardrobe mirror and recognised that it had been so easy to transform herself into what she had so fortuitously escaped becoming, a frugally respectable working woman. For all Nicholas’s assurances, she knew that she was not beautiful – her face was too bony, her mouth was too large – and it was sobering to realise how it was prosperity alone that helped disguise the fact.”  With a description like that I suspect that I’d earn the undying enmity of any actress I’d name as suitable for the part. So I’m keeping my head down and am dodging this question!

Q.   If, as a one-off, you could write anything you want, is there another genre you would love to work with and do you already have a budding plot line in mind?

A.    The time-demand would be beyond me but I’d enjoy researching and writing a narrative history about a single historical event or campaign of relatively short duration – rather in the style of the excellent James Holland. A few nights ago I watched the new movie “The Siege of Jadotville”, about an Irish Army unit on UN service which was plunged into a nightmarish Rorke’s Drift-type situation in Katanga in 1961. There’s been one book about it already but it represents the type of event I’d choose to write a book about if I could afford the time.

Q.   Do you have any rituals and routines in your writing? Your favourite cup, for example, or your favourite piece of music?

A.    Writing is only half the process – the other half is “living” scenes in my head, and for this afternoon walks with my dog Rufus are essential. I go back over what I’ve written in the morning – I sometimes get insights on how to improve it – and I think through, indeed feel through and live through, what will follow.  My characters are real to me and they get more real still as I visualise what they’ll say and do, and how they’ll feel, in the following scenes and chapters.

Q.   Other than writing full time, what would be your dream job?

A.    An astronaut! Even one orbit would be worth diamonds! I think that the saddest thing about our mortality is that we don’t know exactly where the future will take Humanity. I’m pretty sure however that it’s going to take us beyond Earth – how far, I can’t imagine – and I’d love to be on the front line in this.

Q.   Coffee or tea, red or white?

A.    For anybody with Dutch connections it can only be coffee – and black!

(I love that answer!)

Q.   Imagine you could get hold of any source document. What would it be?

A.    I’m fascinated by the geometric progression in numbers of ancestors as we work backwards through time. Assuming three generations per century, we each had 512 ancestors three centuries ago – though I guess the actual number may have been considerably less as a fair number of them might have been ancestors through different descendants. There must have been a lot of distant cousins marrying distant cousins a few generations further on. But it’s impossible to visualise the probably very disparate lives of so many eight-times grandparents who were alive in the time of Marlborough, Peter the Great, Louis XIV. I’d love to get my hands on even one document that could give me an insight on how those people lived and loved, what joys and sorrows they knew, what perceptions they had of the world, what passions and concerns and ideals motivated them, what expectations they might have had of the future.

Q.   Historical fiction authors have to contend with real characters invading our stories. Are there any real characters you have been tempted to kill off prematurely or ignore just because you don’t like them, or they spoil the plot?

A.    Historical figures are opportunities – and in some cases are catalysts for the plot. When they’re introduced they’ve got to act in character, even if the incidents they’re involved with are fictional. I prefer to keep my plots within the framework of actual events so killing off a real character would destroy this – it would indeed be an instance of “the butterfly effect” changing history. That isn’t to say that there aren’t real-life figures in my books whom I’d like to have seen come to more unpleasant ends than they did – or indeed whom I’d like not to have been born in the first place. The example that comes to mind is the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid II –– who plays an important role in Britannia’s Wolf. But I’ve had to leave him to live out his long shameful life and be remembered with loathing today as “Abdul the Damned”.

Q.   Are you prepared to go away from the known facts for the sake of the story and if so how do you get around that?

A.    This relates to some extent to the previous question. All “Historical Fiction” is to some “Alternative History” and there’s some point of departure from what really happened. The story develops from that point. In my books the plots fit into real-life timelines, especially in Britannia’s Wolf and Britannia’s Spartan in which much of the action is integrated with what really did happen on a day-by-day basis. Where historical fiction such as my own differs from the best alternative history fiction is that by the end of my books we’re back in the world as it really was and subsequent history has not been changed.

 

Q.   Have you ever totally hated or fallen in love with one of our characters?

A.    I’m definitely in love with Florence Dawlish – what man wouldn’t be? But I’ve also got a sneaking liking for some of my shades-of-grey villains: Silas Culbertson, the ruthless, cunning and brutal ex-Confederate colonel who is also courageous; Fred Kung, the Chinese power-broker who was mutilated during construction of the Central Pacific railroad through the Sierra Nevada and who made a fortune thereafter through shipping corpses back to China; Shimazu Hirosato, a captain of the Japanese Navy who is cruel and pitiless, but is unswerving in his dedication to his Samurai code of honour. And I can’t but love a character who was in fact a real-life one: Adam Worth, a.k.a. Henry Raymond, who was described by Scotland Yard as “The Napoleon of Crime” and who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’ adversary, Professor Moriarty. He was a key player in Britannia’s Shark and Florence encounters him again in the new novel, Britannia’s Amazon.

 

Q.   What do you enjoy reading for pleasure?

A.    I love narrative history and we’re in somewhat of a golden age of it. The late Shelby Foote’s superb The Civil War would be my desert-island book and more recently James D. Hornfischer, Nathaniel Philbrick and Hampton Sides in the United States, and James Holland, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Tom Holland in Britain, have been setting a very high standard. I can’t recommend these authors highly enough.

 

Q.   Last but not least … who is your favourite historical author?

A.    Without hesitation – Zoë Oldenbourg. I know of no other author who has entered into the minds of people whose values and outlook – and world – were so different to our own, and who makes them come alive so movingly and so convincingly. Her masterpiece, Destiny of Fire, is almost unbearably painful to read but it says so much about what is truly valuable in Humanity that I’ve returned to it again and again over the last forty years. It has had a massive effect on my own values and outlook – literally a life-changing book.  Oldenbourg’s histories have the same quality of bringing lost societies poignantly alive.

Antoine and Rufus.

 

A potted biography: Antoine Vanner writes historical naval fiction. He found himself flattered when nautical novelist Joan Druett described him as the "The Tom Clancy of historic naval fiction".
He says: "I find the late Victorian era, roughly 1870 to 1900, fascinating because for my baby-boomer generation it's 'the day before yesterday'. It's history that you can almost touch. Our grandparents grew up in that period and you heard a lot from them about it. So much in that time was so similar to what we still have today that you feel you could live easily in it, and then you hit some aspects - especially those associated with social conventions and attitudes - that make it seem wholly alien. It was a time of change on every front - intellectual, scientific, medical, social, political and technological - and yet people seem to have accommodated to these rapid changes very well." He had had an adventurous life in international business and also travelled extensively on a private basis. He survived military coups, guerrilla warfare, a militia attack, storms at sea and life in mangrove swamps, tropical forest, offshore platforms and the boardroom. Antoine’s knowledge of human nature, passion for nineteenth-century political and military history   and first-hand experience of their locales provide the background to his historical novels centred on the lives of Royal Navy officer Nicholas Dawlish and his wife Florence. The five volumes published so far are all linked to actual historical events and are set in locales as various as the Black Sea and the Balkans in winter, a river-system in the heart of South America, the luxury and squalor of the United States' Gilded Age, Cuba in revolt, Korea as it emerges from centuries of isolation and - not the least deadly - the corrupt and brutal underside of the complacent and outwardly respectable society of Late-Victorian Britain

See more at The Dawlish Chronicles

To see a video of Antoine talking about his latest book and the challenges it presented click here

Britannia’s Amazon: http://amzn.to/2eZurBM

Interview with Antoine Vanner: http://bit.ly/2fEMzm3
Blog Link:  http://bit.ly/15f20oy

Fade out as required!

Diana Milne & Antoine Vanner © November 2016

Anna Reviews: GodBomb! by Kit Power

***The author, Kit Power, has kindly offered a copy to gift to one lucky winner! Please see below for details about the giveaway to be drawn on the 5th October!***

Some people know how to write disturbing texts…Like a pebble in your shoe, Mr Power’s prose gnaws and gnaws, until it is quite unbearable, but at the same time so addictive there is no way in hell one can put the book down. Hell is actually quite a good word to use when thinking about this book. But then, so is God and love. Strange? Bear with me.
  It is 1995, and a group of people have assembled in the community centre of a small town somewhere in the English backwater. All of the people present are there because of God. Well, that is not quite true. Some, like Deborah, have been carted there by her parents who hope their daughter can be miraculously cured if she finds her faith. Others, like Alex, are there to protest homophobic tendencies in the upcoming sermon. Some are just bored, had nothing else to do, really. Emma and Peter are there because their baby is due any day and they love God, believe in Him, need Him. Mike is there to play the sax – but also because this is where he wants to be, close to God who speaks regularly to him. The preacher is there to convert, bring one more sinner to the light. And Isaac…No, let’s leave Isaac alone.
  Seventy odd people assembled and the preacher begins to speak. A young man in the audience shifts restlessly on his seat, is clearly anxious, and the preacher, well-acquainted with the signs, zeroes in on him. This young man may be the one closest to redemption, the one most desperate for grace. Just what the preacher needs, a person with that hungry look in his eyes, all of him begging to be saved. The preacher smiles encouragingly, coaxing the lad to speak. He knows what the question will be – it is always the same question, more or less. At long last, the lad whispers an anguished “do you believe God is real?” People around him titter, are quelled by the preacher’s look – this is a potential convert, for Christ’s sake!
  The preacher assures the boy he believes God to be real – no, he goes one step further and says he knows God exists. When he asks the lad’s opinion, he gets an “I don’t know” in reply. “I came here to find out,” the young man adds. The preacher almost cartwheels – this is going to be easy, like taking candy from a kid. He invites the young man to join him on the stage, saying God will give him the answers he needs.
  “You promise?” The kid is bolt upright now, almost rigid, face rippling with emotions. “I can talk to God? He’ll come talk to me?”
  And that, dear people, is when the preacher makes his second mistake. The first was to zero in on the young man. Now he nods, assuring the young man God is already here, and yes, of course this young seeker will hear his voice.
  “I hope you’re right, preacher, I surely do.” As he talks, his hands pop up from his pockets. The left is just a closed fist, but the right contains a lump of black plastic, with a wire running up his sleeve.
And so begins a nightmare for the people who came to hear the word of God, and instead stand face to face with Armageddon, as represented by a young man with a bomb vest and enough explosives to blow them all sky-high.  Unless God speaks directly to him, the young man says, he will release the switch and condemn them all to death. So, he adds, it is up to the congregation before him to pray to God and ask Him to contact the bomber directly.
  All of this happens within the first few pages of the book. What follows next is an excruciating drama, told through various POVs as the people trapped with the bomber try to work out what to do. Pray and hope for the best? Turns out very few have that kind of faith – in fact, with the exception of Emma and Peter, very few seem to believe in God. Well, Deborah does, she discovers, but she hates God. It’s His fault she ended up in a wheelchair seven years ago, when she was only thirteen. And Mike does, of course. Oh yes, Mike believes in God, puts his life in God’s hands, and whether that helps him or not is something I leave for the readers to discover for themselves.
  The bomber is genuine in his need to find out. Mr Power has avoided the pitfall of making the bomber a caricatured evil maniac. No, this bomber desperately wants to hear God’s voice, hopes that God will speak to him so as to save all these innocent lives. He vacillates between compassion and anger, one moment he is leaning over a man suffering a major fit, the next he casually eviscerates someone who annoys him. Yup. Eviscerates – more or less.

  He taunts Deborah, stuck in her wheelchair, wondering what good it’s done her to pray to God, to hope for healing. Nothing, Deborah replies – which is when she realises just how much she hates God, so much in fact, that the anger coursing through her causes her toes to twitch for the first time in seven years – a miracle?
  Emma goes into labour, and the bomber doesn’t want things to be like this, apologises for doing this to her, but what can he do? He needs answers, and he needs them now. Mr Power does a masterful job of depicting the bomber’s anguish: on the one hand, he is determined to blow them all up with him, but on the other, he is fully aware that these people have done him no wrong, and now there’s going to be a baby as well?
  Six hours in hell. Six hours of sitting in a claustrophobic room, some trying to pray, others just waiting.  Of course, someone in the congregation decides to act. Death is staring them straight in the face, and unless someone does something they’ll all go up in a bang. Alex doesn’t want to go up in a bang – but she has no faith in God, so she isn’t exactly expecting Him to come to their rescue. As a reader, I can’t but smile crookedly, remembering that old adage “God helps those who help themselves.”
  I will not reveal what happens. I will just share with you that rarely have I been so engrossed in a book. I read and read and read, I hoped and prayed, I sighed and cursed. The various characters are brought to vivid life by Mr Power, their distinctive voices blending into something that very quickly begins to sound as a Requiem. Whether it is or not, is not for me to tell. I urge you instead to pick up GodBomb! and read it for yourself, and while you’re at it you may have to confront your own beliefs, your own fears.

  Does God exist? Well some events in this book definitely point to the answer being yes. Others indicate the reverse. And if God does exist, is he benign? The bomber wants to know – by the end of the book, you will also want to know, while mulling over the unexpected ending.
  I have read Mr Power before, have been swept away by his mastery of language, his way of wiggling into the brain of his characters until you’re quite sure you’re sitting in their head, privy to their every thought. In this book, his obvious writing skills come together with a magnificently constructed plot. The result is dark and explosive. I can but congratulate Mr Power on this little masterpiece, an emotional rollercoaster that left me quite incapable of even drinking my tea – I just couldn’t tear my eyes away from the text.

About the author

Kit Power lives in Milton Keynes, England, and insists he’s fine with that. His short fiction has been widely submitted, and occasionally published, including in Splatterpunk magazine, The 'At Hells Gate' anthology series, and most recently by The Sinister Horror Company as part of 'The Black Room Manuscripts' anthology. His short story collection 'A Warning About Your Future Enslavement That You Will Dismiss As A Collection Of Short Ficton: Not A Novel: A Novel' will be released by Double Life Press in October 2015. Those of you who enjoy near-professional levels of prevarication are invited to check out his blog at:
http://www.kitpowerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/

He is also the lead singer and chief lyricist for legendary rock band The Disciples Of Gonzo, who have thus far managed to avoid world-conquering fame and fortune, though it’s clearly only a matter of time. They lurk online at:
http://www.disciplesofgonzo.com/
GodBomb! is available on Amazon UK and Amazon.com

To win a copy of this gripping tale, please leave a comment or if you prefer , leave a comment on our Facebook page

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Anna Belfrage is the author of eight published books, all part of the acclaimed The Graham Saga. Set in the 17th century, the books tell the story of Matthew Graham and his time-travelling wife, Alex Lind. Anna can be found on amazon, twitter, facebook and on her website. 

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