Author
- Alan Davis 1
- Alan Workman 2
- Angela E. Lord 1
- Arnold J. Wade 1
- Bill Bailey 5
- C.D. Edwards 1
- Carol Lake 3
- Carol M. Creasey 15
- Charlie Workman 1
- Chloe Hall 1
- Christopher John 1
- Denys S. Sissons 2
- Dor Satcey 1
- Dorinda Jeynes 1
- Dr Tony Kendle 1
- Edwina Wood 1
- Eileen Quinn 1
- Eleanor Casbon 1
- Elizabeth Flawn 1
- Eric Kemp 4
- Eric V. Mold 1
- Gabriel Ellison 3
- Geoff Broady 1
- Geoff Mallinson 5
- Geoffrey Rawlings 2
- George Payne 1
- Gwyneth Lambert 4
- Helen Darby 1
- Ian J. Heading 1
- Inga Joseph 4
- Ingrid Jacoby 4
- Jack Davidson 1
- James Barnes 1
- James Penhaligon 1
- Jean Cooper 1
- John D. Vose 1
- John Fowler 1
- John Groves 3
- John Hambly 1
- John Hutchins 2
- Judith A.M. Pinto 1
- Judith Mather 2
- Leslie Scrase 10
- Lorraine White 1
- Margaret Baudert 2
- Margaret Morris 1
- Marguerite Porthouse 2
- Marson Holbrook 1
- Mavis Gore 2
- Mildred 1
Upcoming & New Releases
Published 25th September
Bowsie and Wowsie love the good things in life, especially good food. Political journalist Jane Bonnd isn’t so bad either. She’s silly enough to think she’s the owner and they’re the pets, when it’s so obviously the other way round.
Lucky for her she’s got them to watch her back when events catch up with her. Which they do when she tangles with a bunch of crazy populist guys running MEGA (Making England Great Again), who are determined to redraw the world map.
Not to say the dogs know everything, mind. Getting the hots for a top spy does make for tricky times. Even they don’t know how that’s going to work out, any more than she does, as it happens…
ISBN: 9781852002244
Size: 212x135mm
Binding: Paperback
Length: 233pp
*Paperback published on 4th September
Murder at Westgate Bay (Third in the Alan Clarke crime series)
Now permanently relocated to the Kent coast after the successful outcomes of his two previous murder cases, DCI Alan Clarke is just settling in to his new environment, together with his wife and baby son, when he is called to solve the cold-blooded and premeditated murder of Dr Ian Jones at Westgate Bay.
The doctor had been sedated and poisoned, dying in agony. DCI Clarke soon has a list of suspects, ranging from the doctor’s estranged wife and her lover, his gambling brother, his housekeeper and her sister. Added to these, Doctor Jones’s love child Holly comes into the frame. . . and then there is a second murder by poison.
Whilst the similarity of the two murders seems more than coincidence, DCI Alan Clarke cannot work out a connection, until a single piece of apparently innocuous evidence comes to light. But is it too late to prevent further murder and loss of life?
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Paperback (ISBN 9781852002237) and Hardback (ISBN 9781852002091)
Length: 224pp
Murder At Canterbury Cathedral (Fifth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
On Christmas Eve, a body is found lying in the snow outside the gates of Canterbury Cathedral. At first, it appears to be a tragic accident, but when forensic evidence reveals a fatal blow to the back of the head, the truth emerges: Jon West has been murdered – and DCI Alan Clarke has a crime to solve during the festive period.
The son of prominent MP Charles West, Jon was notorious for his reckless partying and serial womanising – and often saved from scandal by his responsible twin brother, Isaac. Nevertheless, Jon’s charm left a trail of damaged relationships and bitter enemies. He had affairs with sisters Eve and Lucy, the latter now married to Isaac, placing both women—and Isaac himself—under suspicion. Eve’s volatile boyfriend Mark, who openly threatened Jon shortly before his death, quickly joins the growing list of suspects.
As Alan and his team dig deeper, they uncover more unsettling connections. A troubled taxi driver, Dan Williams, seems unnervingly invested in the case; and when Alan discovers that Dan’s daughter died five years earlier, with her body found close to where Jon was killed, the investigation takes a darker turn. And then Jon’s closest friend Jack also has a motive, having been twice betrayed by Jon stealing his girlfriends.
Alan must unravel the truth from the lies beneath the snow to find out who was out to commit murder on that cold December night.
ISBN: 9781852002220
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: TBC
There seems to be a mystery about what happened to Uncle Freddy in the desert during the Second World War. Did it happen? How did it happen? And what were the connections with Stuttgart which came to a sudden halt in the Great War? There is certainly a Lonie in the family, named after a German friend of Uncle Freddy’s grandmother – and dachshunds, too.
The story behind these questions is told through memories delving back to the latter part of the 19th century. Memories which stem from, and return to, the gathering following Uncle Freddy’s funeral, in the room where his young eyes, captured in a photograph, seem to look out and reach through time into the present.
In the short story Grove Mansions, the author remembers her time living in a flat within a grand old house approaching the end of its days. Her life and the tenants within the house, including the ever-present Mr Barker, the caretaker, are recalled with a perception that leaves a lasting impression.
ISBN: 9781852002213
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: paperback
Length: 120pp
From the far west of Cornwall comes the story of Joel Andrewartha, the legendary Cornish wrestler born in 1781. His father, Richard, is a tin-miner/farmer, although his mother came from a more affluent background.
We follow the Andrewartha family as they struggle to make a living from their farm at Kenneggy, their hopes and fortunes tied to the land, mines and sea of Mount’s Bay, and as Joel finds love and solace with his childhood sweetheart, Caroline.
Richard Nettell beautifully captures the real people and places of this far-flung corner of late 18th- and early 19th-century Cornwall, writing about his own distant relatives and showing his impressive knowledge of West Country customs, speech and folklore, including that of mining, farming and wrecking.
This is truly a rediscovered gem of a story by an excellent writer, first published just before the outbreak of the Second World War and out of print ever since.
ISBN: 9781852002206
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 220
Prime Position: A Novel on the Cornish Housing Crisis
Winner of the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards 2026 - Literary FictionThis is a story of relationships and life in the Cornish village of Porthallett, set on the south coast of Cornwall, where photographer Kenwyn Tabb finds he is the latest to be evicted to make way for yet another luxurious second home, as the scourge of second and holiday home ownership continues throughout the county.
Kenwyn is a member of a half-hearted group of Cornish patriots calling themselves ‘c4c’, and he becomes further enraged when he discovers his close friend Jackie’s parents are to be thrown off their mobile home retirement site based on the all-dominant Penquiddick Estate land.
The debt-ridden Penquiddick Estate has recently been inherited by the reluctant James Crago, who would really prefer to work on his sculptures than deal with the estate’s financial decline. He finds solace in giving the management job to Mark Shipwright, an estate agent with a taste for profit over people.
When James decides to scrap the traditional village show at Penquiddick for an upmarket literary festival, it is the final straw for locals, and ‘c4c’ decide to sabotage the festival. But as the locals unite to protest at the destruction of their community, the demonstration takes an unexpected turn, spiralling disastrously out of control and risking consequences none of them could have foreseen.
ISBN: 9781852002190
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 254
Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families
This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.
The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.
Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.
ISBN: 9781852002176
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
123 Photos
Length: 284pp
Children of Another Time: Cornish Childhood Memories From Truro in World War II
Childhood memories from the early years of the Second World War are bound together in a unique way within Children of Another Time, as Neville Harcourt Paddy takes us back to Hendra, an area in Truro, Cornwall, nestled beneath the city’s iconic viaduct.
With the arrival of war, everything changed, and the people of Truro took on work to help the war effort, whilst opening their already cramped homes to the evacuees.
Against the backdrop of blackouts, rationing and air raid sirens, for the children, life found its way into the cracks of war’s shadow. The woods and countryside surrounding the city became their magical battleground, where they waged their own fight against the despised Nazi regime, echoing the whispers of their parents’ fears overheard at home.
For these children, the war wasn’t just something happening abroad – it was etched into the fabric of their growing up, a strange blend of fear, resilience, and the unyielding spark of childhood imagination.
Through a distinctive blend of ongoing narratives and standalone stories, Neville intertwines the resilience of childhood innocence with the history and beauty of Hendra. Children of Another Time is a nostalgic tribute to a generation who grew up in the midst of war, finding light in the darkest of times.
ISBN: 9781852002169
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 298
Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Final Lap With Mercedes: 2024 - An Unofficial Account
This is a definitive unofficial account of seven-time world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton and his final year with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team before his move to Ferrari.
Carol M. Creasey is already well known by fans of Sir Lewis, following four years writing on the SilverArrows.net website, which is the main unofficial site covering Mercedes F1. In this book she starts with a brief history of Sir Lewis’s career and life, and then records all his races with Mercedes throughout 2024, including his iconic win at the British Grand Prix.
There are details of events within the Formula One paddock and Sir Lewis’s team mates, and Carol shares her support and enthusiasm for the man himself. She intends to give some of the proceeds from this book to Mission 44, the charity Sir Lewis founded, which is set up to build a more inclusive future for young people around the world.
ISBN: 9781852002183
Size: 212×135mm
Binding: paperback
Length: approx 110pp with colour photos
Murder at the Broadstairs' Funfair (Fourth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
DCI Alan Clarke, now settled in Beltinge with his wife Zoe and their young son, is given the urgent case to solve the high-profile murder of well-known author Stephen Wards’ wife Chloe. Her strangulated lifeless body has been found on a public bench on the Broadstairs’ promenade next to the Bank Holiday Funfair.
A tangled web of suspects emerges, ranging from Chloe’s famous husband, his best friend Richard, their nanny Kaye and a local boy with a huge crush on Chloe named Sam. There is also Vince, a gypsy from the funfair.
At home, Zoe has recently given birth to their baby daughter and is suffering from post natal depression, so Alan enlists the help of Monique, a French au pair. Unfortunately it becomes clear that Monique has her own psychological problems which could endanger their children.
As pressure to solve the murder case builds, Alan finds himself torn between his home life and work; not realising that the two are already more deeply and dangerously entangled than he ever thought possible.
ISBN: 9781852002152
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 209pp
Three Paths to a Decent Life: Dismantling the teaching of St. Paul Sequel to Jesus for a Secular Age?
The Christian New Testament is dominated by two men, Jesus and Paul. Take away the four gospels and the letters of Paul and it is surprising how little of real significance is left.
Following Leslie Scrase’s recent book on the relevance of Jesus for a secular age, he felt he had to continue and take a closer look at Paul.
More than any other person, Paul was responsible for turning a small Jewish sect into an organisation holding the capacity to become a world religion. His dynamic, driven, self-assured character, combined with his organisational skills, put together with his determination that the new religion was for all mankind and not just for Jews, led to the early spread and success of the new religion.
Without Paul it is more than possible there would be no Christian churches and no Christian religion today.
ISBN: 9781852002145
Size: 217x135mm
Binding: paperback
Length: 83pp
It’s hard to solve a mystery when you can’t even remember there’s a mystery to solve…
Suffering from partial amnesia, and unable to recall the events surrounding the accident that caused this state, twenty-one year old Dipali Kaur is placed under the care of Dr Thorn, a genial therapist who unfortunately has his own mental health problems.
Who did Dipali inadvertently save from plunging to their death? Does a six-year-old boy on a red tricycle really have any answers? And just who is the alluringly mysterious young man she meets on a visit to a WWI battlefield in France?
Throughout her witty, entertaining and occasionally poignant narration, Dipali highlights the fact that nothing in her life is as straightforward as it may seem, but her thoughts about everything and everyone are affirming and uplifting.
ISBN: 9781852002138
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 225pp
It is 1961, and Ellen is pregnant at the tender age of seventeen. Her boyfriend has moved on to another girl, and her mother is dominated by her father who she knows will be ruthless if he were to find out about her pregnancy.
On one day that changes her life forever, Ellen hitch-hikes to Herne Bay in the hope of starting a new life with her baby, but ends up being forced to have baby Grace adopted; an act which will haunt her and affect her mental health for the rest of her life.
The lives of both Grace and Ellen continue apart. Grace is in a loving home, supported by parents who embrace her even more when they learn she has autism, a condition by which Grace refuses to be defined; but she does have a continued curiosity about her birth mother.
Meanwhile, Ellen’s life takes unexpected turns, but the day she gave up her baby remains etched in her memory. The weight of her decision haunts her.
The years pass by but fate has one last surprise in store, another single day in Ellen’s life that holds the potential to rewrite their destinies.
ISBN: 9781852002121
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 215pp
Published 25th September
Bowsie and Wowsie love the good things in life, especially good food. Political journalist Jane Bonnd isn’t so bad either. She’s silly enough to think she’s the owner and they’re the pets, when it’s so obviously the other way round.
Lucky for her she’s got them to watch her back when events catch up with her. Which they do when she tangles with a bunch of crazy populist guys running MEGA (Making England Great Again), who are determined to redraw the world map.
Not to say the dogs know everything, mind. Getting the hots for a top spy does make for tricky times. Even they don’t know how that’s going to work out, any more than she does, as it happens…
ISBN: 9781852002244
Size: 212x135mm
Binding: Paperback
Length: 233pp
Nobody's Perfect (First in the Alan Clarke crime series)
When superstar of stage and screen Eleanor Harrison is clubbed to death, the whole of Britain reacts to the tragedy.
It is a puzzling case for DCI Alan Clarke as, along with his working partner WPC Sarah Stevens, he sets out to find a reason why anyone would want to murder such a well-loved celebrity.
The detectives discover secrets about Eleanor’s personal life that differ from the public’s perception of her perfect character, and it becomes clear that there are a number of suspects. These range from Eleanor’s own sister Isabel to obsessive fan Peter Grant; with Eleanor’s housekeeper, ex-husband and counsellor all also in the frame.
Just when Alan Clarke considers the case might never be closed, events become personal. His girlfriend Zoe and a woman police constable go missing, and the hunt for a psychopathic killer becomes a race against time.
ISBN: 9781852001988
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 200pp
Murder At Canterbury Cathedral (Fifth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
On Christmas Eve, a body is found lying in the snow outside the gates of Canterbury Cathedral. At first, it appears to be a tragic accident, but when forensic evidence reveals a fatal blow to the back of the head, the truth emerges: Jon West has been murdered – and DCI Alan Clarke has a crime to solve during the festive period.
The son of prominent MP Charles West, Jon was notorious for his reckless partying and serial womanising – and often saved from scandal by his responsible twin brother, Isaac. Nevertheless, Jon’s charm left a trail of damaged relationships and bitter enemies. He had affairs with sisters Eve and Lucy, the latter now married to Isaac, placing both women—and Isaac himself—under suspicion. Eve’s volatile boyfriend Mark, who openly threatened Jon shortly before his death, quickly joins the growing list of suspects.
As Alan and his team dig deeper, they uncover more unsettling connections. A troubled taxi driver, Dan Williams, seems unnervingly invested in the case; and when Alan discovers that Dan’s daughter died five years earlier, with her body found close to where Jon was killed, the investigation takes a darker turn. And then Jon’s closest friend Jack also has a motive, having been twice betrayed by Jon stealing his girlfriends.
Alan must unravel the truth from the lies beneath the snow to find out who was out to commit murder on that cold December night.
ISBN: 9781852002220
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: TBC
There seems to be a mystery about what happened to Uncle Freddy in the desert during the Second World War. Did it happen? How did it happen? And what were the connections with Stuttgart which came to a sudden halt in the Great War? There is certainly a Lonie in the family, named after a German friend of Uncle Freddy’s grandmother – and dachshunds, too.
The story behind these questions is told through memories delving back to the latter part of the 19th century. Memories which stem from, and return to, the gathering following Uncle Freddy’s funeral, in the room where his young eyes, captured in a photograph, seem to look out and reach through time into the present.
In the short story Grove Mansions, the author remembers her time living in a flat within a grand old house approaching the end of its days. Her life and the tenants within the house, including the ever-present Mr Barker, the caretaker, are recalled with a perception that leaves a lasting impression.
ISBN: 9781852002213
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: paperback
Length: 120pp
From the far west of Cornwall comes the story of Joel Andrewartha, the legendary Cornish wrestler born in 1781. His father, Richard, is a tin-miner/farmer, although his mother came from a more affluent background.
We follow the Andrewartha family as they struggle to make a living from their farm at Kenneggy, their hopes and fortunes tied to the land, mines and sea of Mount’s Bay, and as Joel finds love and solace with his childhood sweetheart, Caroline.
Richard Nettell beautifully captures the real people and places of this far-flung corner of late 18th- and early 19th-century Cornwall, writing about his own distant relatives and showing his impressive knowledge of West Country customs, speech and folklore, including that of mining, farming and wrecking.
This is truly a rediscovered gem of a story by an excellent writer, first published just before the outbreak of the Second World War and out of print ever since.
ISBN: 9781852002206
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 220
Prime Position: A Novel on the Cornish Housing Crisis
Winner of the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards 2026 - Literary FictionThis is a story of relationships and life in the Cornish village of Porthallett, set on the south coast of Cornwall, where photographer Kenwyn Tabb finds he is the latest to be evicted to make way for yet another luxurious second home, as the scourge of second and holiday home ownership continues throughout the county.
Kenwyn is a member of a half-hearted group of Cornish patriots calling themselves ‘c4c’, and he becomes further enraged when he discovers his close friend Jackie’s parents are to be thrown off their mobile home retirement site based on the all-dominant Penquiddick Estate land.
The debt-ridden Penquiddick Estate has recently been inherited by the reluctant James Crago, who would really prefer to work on his sculptures than deal with the estate’s financial decline. He finds solace in giving the management job to Mark Shipwright, an estate agent with a taste for profit over people.
When James decides to scrap the traditional village show at Penquiddick for an upmarket literary festival, it is the final straw for locals, and ‘c4c’ decide to sabotage the festival. But as the locals unite to protest at the destruction of their community, the demonstration takes an unexpected turn, spiralling disastrously out of control and risking consequences none of them could have foreseen.
ISBN: 9781852002190
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 254
Murder at the Broadstairs' Funfair (Fourth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
DCI Alan Clarke, now settled in Beltinge with his wife Zoe and their young son, is given the urgent case to solve the high-profile murder of well-known author Stephen Wards’ wife Chloe. Her strangulated lifeless body has been found on a public bench on the Broadstairs’ promenade next to the Bank Holiday Funfair.
A tangled web of suspects emerges, ranging from Chloe’s famous husband, his best friend Richard, their nanny Kaye and a local boy with a huge crush on Chloe named Sam. There is also Vince, a gypsy from the funfair.
At home, Zoe has recently given birth to their baby daughter and is suffering from post natal depression, so Alan enlists the help of Monique, a French au pair. Unfortunately it becomes clear that Monique has her own psychological problems which could endanger their children.
As pressure to solve the murder case builds, Alan finds himself torn between his home life and work; not realising that the two are already more deeply and dangerously entangled than he ever thought possible.
ISBN: 9781852002152
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 209pp
It’s hard to solve a mystery when you can’t even remember there’s a mystery to solve…
Suffering from partial amnesia, and unable to recall the events surrounding the accident that caused this state, twenty-one year old Dipali Kaur is placed under the care of Dr Thorn, a genial therapist who unfortunately has his own mental health problems.
Who did Dipali inadvertently save from plunging to their death? Does a six-year-old boy on a red tricycle really have any answers? And just who is the alluringly mysterious young man she meets on a visit to a WWI battlefield in France?
Throughout her witty, entertaining and occasionally poignant narration, Dipali highlights the fact that nothing in her life is as straightforward as it may seem, but her thoughts about everything and everyone are affirming and uplifting.
ISBN: 9781852002138
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 225pp
It is 1961, and Ellen is pregnant at the tender age of seventeen. Her boyfriend has moved on to another girl, and her mother is dominated by her father who she knows will be ruthless if he were to find out about her pregnancy.
On one day that changes her life forever, Ellen hitch-hikes to Herne Bay in the hope of starting a new life with her baby, but ends up being forced to have baby Grace adopted; an act which will haunt her and affect her mental health for the rest of her life.
The lives of both Grace and Ellen continue apart. Grace is in a loving home, supported by parents who embrace her even more when they learn she has autism, a condition by which Grace refuses to be defined; but she does have a continued curiosity about her birth mother.
Meanwhile, Ellen’s life takes unexpected turns, but the day she gave up her baby remains etched in her memory. The weight of her decision haunts her.
The years pass by but fate has one last surprise in store, another single day in Ellen’s life that holds the potential to rewrite their destinies.
ISBN: 9781852002121
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 215pp
*Paperback published on 4th September
Murder at Westgate Bay (Third in the Alan Clarke crime series)
Now permanently relocated to the Kent coast after the successful outcomes of his two previous murder cases, DCI Alan Clarke is just settling in to his new environment, together with his wife and baby son, when he is called to solve the cold-blooded and premeditated murder of Dr Ian Jones at Westgate Bay.
The doctor had been sedated and poisoned, dying in agony. DCI Clarke soon has a list of suspects, ranging from the doctor’s estranged wife and her lover, his gambling brother, his housekeeper and her sister. Added to these, Doctor Jones’s love child Holly comes into the frame. . . and then there is a second murder by poison.
Whilst the similarity of the two murders seems more than coincidence, DCI Alan Clarke cannot work out a connection, until a single piece of apparently innocuous evidence comes to light. But is it too late to prevent further murder and loss of life?
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Paperback (ISBN 9781852002237) and Hardback (ISBN 9781852002091)
Length: 224pp
A Twist of Fate - The new Sanders & Wade Murder Case
When Cornish based DI Cassie Wade is called out to a violent murder scene in Penzance, her past collides with the present as her old school friend, Suzi, becomes the prime suspect.
Cassie refuses to accept her friend is responsible and her attitude leaves DCI Peter Sanders with no choice but to exclude her from the investigation. He is relieved when she travels back to her native Liverpool to give evidence on one of her former cases.
On her return, Cassie has to investigate the rape of a teenage girl which unexpectedly becomes a hunt for a violent murderer. A flash of inspiration provides Cassie with, not one, but two suspects whose identities are inextricably linked.
Now dealing with two murder cases and feeling pressure between work and family, Peter reluctantly decides he needs Cassie on board to find her old school friend, who, it is feared, may be in danger herself.
A surprising twist of fate sends Cassie back to her childhood home in Liverpool, revisiting past events which could finally explain present happenings three hundred miles away in her new home county of Cornwall.
ISBN: 9781852002084
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 210pp aprox
Perfectly Evil (Second in the Alan Clarke crime series)
DCI Alan Clarke returns in this new detective murder/mystery story set in Carol M. Creasey’s home area of Bishopstone and Reculver in Kent. Alan Clarke first appeared in the story Nobody’s Perfect, and has now been sent to solve the murder of a teenage girl found on a beach near Herne Bay. Coincidentally, another young girl at the scene of the crime is Dee, daughter of mentally unstable Sadie Morton Brown, a character from Carol’s Evil Woman novels and, along with her half-brother Billy, she becomes a possible suspect in this new murder case.
Together with his police partner Wendy Stuart, Alan is thrust into a world of teenage angst within which he needs to solve who killed Janet. Her body was found on the beach not far from Dee, and Billy was her boyfriend yet seems indifferent to her death. Beth is Dee’s closest friend, but appears to be hiding a huge secret, while Jenny only reignites her friendship with Dee just after Janet is killed. . .
The mystery deepens when a menacing leather-clad figure on a motorbike crosses the Fairy Bridge at Bishopstone Glen and forces Dee to tumble down towards the ravine. Then Dee disappears and Alan realises she is in great danger. Is her disappearance linked to the murder? And can he save Dee before it’s too late?
ISBN: 9781852002015
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 208pp
The year is 1789, and Eddy Adams awaits execution in Newgate Prison along with French puppeteer Henri Castillou. His escape is enabled by Calvert, an enigmatic gentleman who, from that moment on, appears to have an altruistic interest in saving Eddy at times of danger.
As a fugitive from the authorities, Eddy’s life takes on a momentum of its own. He becomes entangled with a band of highway robbers, falls in love with an extraordinary woman called Rumer and, on discovering he has a gift for carving wooden figures, is befriended by Italian puppeteer Giovanni Piccini, performer of the popular Punch & Joan street show.
With the Bow Street Runners hot on his heels, Eddy’s escape leads to him being taken prisoner by the French. The French Revolution is in full flow, and it is Calvert who once again comes to Eddy’s aid, reuniting him with fellow escapee Henri and his wayward wife Cécile. After experiencing life farming in the Pyrenees, Eddy finds himself responsible for Cécile and her son on a hazardous return to England.
Back in London, Eddy discovers a passion as a performer of the popular Punch & Joan street show, soon to become known as Punch & Judy, and reunites with his friend Piccini.
Finally settled after all his amazing escapes and adventures, Eddy needs to learn the identity of the man who made all this possible – his lifetime saviour Calvert.
ISBN: 9781852002039
Size: 212x135m
Binding: paperback
Length: 450pp aprox
We follow Emily, Sylvia, Paul and Gavin’s lives from 1990s carefree children through to the years of 2020-21 and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Emily and Gavin become teenage lovers, but Gavin goes off to university to study law, giving a jealous Sylvia the opportunity to get close to him. His work takes them to the USA. Meanwhile, Emily and Paul get married.
The years pass through to 2019, when a disillusioned Sylvia returns to Britain and subsequently wreaks havoc against Emily’s happy but childless marriage. This culminates in Sylvia having a terrible breakdown, and Emily suspecting that Sylvia is carrying Paul’s baby.
Gavin also returns to Britain to visit his parents, but realises immediately on seeing Emily that he is still in love with his childhood sweetheart, who turns to him when her marriage is in turmoil.
Due to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic and severe lockdown restrictions, Emily cannot leave Paul, despite the fact that her friend might be having his baby, and Gavin cannot return to the USA to avoid his feelings for Emily.
With their lives in turmoil, and a final twist of fate to thwart Emily, what will become of their relationships set against the course of the pandemic?
ISBN: 9781852002046
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 208pp
Vengeance Visits Cornwall (A Sanders and Wade Trilogy)
These are three intriguing murder detective stories from the rugged coast and landscape of West Cornwall.
In The Moving Finger the newly reinstated DI Peter Sanders is under pressure to prove himself following his suspension by Devon and Cornwall Police. Sandra Parks is in a coma after being brutally attacked and DI Sanders and his team must find the person responsible. Their first inclinations are dashed when Sandra’s work colleague is murdered and there are two other apparently unconnected killings. Peter needs to solve this case for the sake of his reputation.
Dust to Dust brings a complex murder investigation from the wild Cornish coast, where the body of a young girl is discovered in a mine shaft. Now promoted to DCI, Sanders finds himself assimilating into his team the feisty ex-Liverpool detective Cassandra Wade, who is unhappy with her posting to ‘sleepy Cornwall’. However, her expertise in drug crime and child exploitation soon come to the fore and she becomes immersed in the case.
The finale of this trilogy, Snow Upon the Desert, finds DI Cassandra Wade at Cornwall’s Minack Theatre when a murder is committed on stage during the performance. As she was at the scene and witnessed the crime, identifying the murderer should be easy, but not in the world of acting and special effects, where Cassandra struggles to differentiate reality from illusion. Her boss DCI Sanders returns from his honeymoon to find the case in disarray and his DI blind to what’s in front of her.
ISBN: 9781852002008
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 325pp aprox
It’s the ‘best day ever’ for 11 year-old Tommy Wagstaff when his Da presents him with a feisty bundle of energy and fur in the shape of a small puppy, which the boy affectionately names ‘Our Patch’.
‘Our Patch’ turns out to be no ordinary dog. From day one the little Bedlington Terrier knows his ‘rightful’ place as ‘top dog’ among all the other animals in the village.
Set in a Yorkshire mining community named Hillthorpe just before the First World War, the book tells the tales (tails) of Patch’s many adventures and escapades with his ‘young master Tommy’.
Join Patch in his spats with his arch enemy Archie, a pampered ‘working’ cocker spaniel, and his feline nemesis Genghis – a half Mongolian wildcat, who terrorises his fellow creatures in the village. These two despicable creatures soon learn that ‘nobody gets the better of a Bedlington’ and there’s only one top dog (or cat) in Hillthorpe!
Sometimes hilarious but also quite profound, these stories of ‘Our Patch’ will appeal to all ages.
ISBN: 9781852001957
Size: 212x135m
Binding: Paperback
Length: 210pp
Through the Granite Mirror: An epic story of a Cornish farming family
Standback only came for a funeral, and the ferrets. Fifteen years ago he’d turned his back on Cornwall. He’d stopped belonging after the sale of Trevarnon Farm. Curiosity leads him back to Trevarnon where his brother Eddie is repairing a Cornish hedge, a hedge originally built by Grandad.
Standback can’t resist the stones. As the brothers work from opposite sides of the hedge in the traditional manner, the ever-present voice of Grandad echoing in their memories, we live through the changing face of rural West Penwith from the end of World War II into the 21st century.
This story of two brothers is also a story of the granite land itself . . . the soil, the cliffs and in particular the Cornish hedges, home to so many species of plants, mammals, insects, and secrets.
ISBN: 9781852001964
Size: 212x135m
Binding: paperback
Length: 137pp
In this extremely original and creative story we share the present world of successful author Myra Vilas, a beautiful and confident woman with a baby daughter, but a dreadful secret, as she becomes inextricably linked with her latest novel; an account of a dystopian future set in the 24th century.Readers are quickly enticed from the present time into the future as the chapters of Myra’s manuscript are unveiled and her words unfold a disturbing story that keeps us guessing.
Meanwhile the narrative of Myra’s own life is revealed and we become aware that she is dealing with loss and post-natal depression, unable to open to anyone but her closest friend, despite her outward assertiveness.
As her manuscript evolves we find that the fictional future Myra is creating contains an enigmatic portrayal of characters from her actual world, with names being anagrams or puns of their real-world counterparts, but their stories darkly different.
A Parallel Life becomes a broodingly and deeply psychological account of a woman who is beset with a traumatic and emotional past that culminates in the most extreme despair life can offer.
ISBN: 9781852001940
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 200pp
Published 23rd October 2026
A Life Of Opening Doors - Of Flying Helicopters and Farming; Of Vehicles for Disabled People and Rest Homes; Of Bed & Breakfasts and Websites and Automata.
This is the remarkable story of a life shaped by determination and innovation.
Beginning with a candid account of his 1940s childhood and private education, we follow Robin Adeney’s journey through commercial pilot training at Hamble, conversion to helicopters, and a varied flying career in crop spraying and executive air transport that took him across the UK, Nigeria, Greece and beyond.
Family life eventually prompted a dramatic change of direction, and Robin and his wife, Elizabeth, turned to farming in Dorset, where they brought up their two boys, but where the rewards and challenges of working alongside his father ultimately tested both family ties and ambition.
Never one to stand still, the author describes the thinking and research that led to his
development of pioneering mobility solutions for disabled people, before he and Elizabeth
established two successful residential care homes dedicated to enriching the lives of their residents in Dorset. Then retirement from that venture led to yet another success story, with two VisitBritain 5-star Bed & Breakfasts renowned for their quality and hospitality.
Honest, thoughtful and often inspiring, this is a fascinating account of a life lived to the full—one filled with adventure, enterprise, setbacks, reinvention and the enduring belief that every new challenge offers another opportunity.
ISBN: 9781852002251
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
121 Photos
Length: 303pp
Children of Another Time: Cornish Childhood Memories From Truro in World War II
Childhood memories from the early years of the Second World War are bound together in a unique way within Children of Another Time, as Neville Harcourt Paddy takes us back to Hendra, an area in Truro, Cornwall, nestled beneath the city’s iconic viaduct.
With the arrival of war, everything changed, and the people of Truro took on work to help the war effort, whilst opening their already cramped homes to the evacuees.
Against the backdrop of blackouts, rationing and air raid sirens, for the children, life found its way into the cracks of war’s shadow. The woods and countryside surrounding the city became their magical battleground, where they waged their own fight against the despised Nazi regime, echoing the whispers of their parents’ fears overheard at home.
For these children, the war wasn’t just something happening abroad – it was etched into the fabric of their growing up, a strange blend of fear, resilience, and the unyielding spark of childhood imagination.
Through a distinctive blend of ongoing narratives and standalone stories, Neville intertwines the resilience of childhood innocence with the history and beauty of Hendra. Children of Another Time is a nostalgic tribute to a generation who grew up in the midst of war, finding light in the darkest of times.
ISBN: 9781852002169
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 298
Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families
This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.
The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.
Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.
ISBN: 9781852002176
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
123 Photos
Length: 284pp
Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Final Lap With Mercedes: 2024 - An Unofficial Account
This is a definitive unofficial account of seven-time world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton and his final year with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team before his move to Ferrari.
Carol M. Creasey is already well known by fans of Sir Lewis, following four years writing on the SilverArrows.net website, which is the main unofficial site covering Mercedes F1. In this book she starts with a brief history of Sir Lewis’s career and life, and then records all his races with Mercedes throughout 2024, including his iconic win at the British Grand Prix.
There are details of events within the Formula One paddock and Sir Lewis’s team mates, and Carol shares her support and enthusiasm for the man himself. She intends to give some of the proceeds from this book to Mission 44, the charity Sir Lewis founded, which is set up to build a more inclusive future for young people around the world.
ISBN: 9781852002183
Size: 212×135mm
Binding: paperback
Length: approx 110pp with colour photos
From his early childhood days in St. Ives, Eric had always known he was destined for a life at sea, and he has already told the story of his Merchant Navy cadet training on HMS Worcester in his book Yes, Dad I Want to Go to Sea!
After his training with HMS Worcester, Eric worked as an apprentice with the Ellerman and Bucknall Steamship Company, where he gained his Chief Officer’s Certificate. Following this he joined the Palm Line as a Second Officer.
Here he remembers his five years with the Palm Line from 1960 to 1965. During this time he served in fourteen of the company’s ships, ranging from the ageing Ashanti Palm to the more modern Ikeja Palm. These ships crossed the oceans to West Africa and back, with voyages spread between Dakar in the north to Luanda and Lobito in the south, often with sixteen hour working days in the intense tropical heat.
At this time countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone were becoming independent and this often added considerably to the stress and difficulties when loading and off-loading goods in the port docks, and it was Eric’s job to oversee that these operations ran smoothly.
Eric recounts the highs and lows he faced in an honest and engaging way, whether it was facing a ship plagued with rats, establishing a friendly relationship with dock workers, all of whom he always treated as equals regardless of hierarchy, or dealing with captains that bullied and made life difficult and occasionally dangerous.
During his time with the Palm Line Eric married Jill and his first son Ian was born, and Eric recounts how he was always happiest on his return to his hometown of St. Ives in Cornwall to be with his family. So, after a sadly rather fractious experience with the company, and having by then gained his Master Mariner’s Certificate, he left the Palm Line. He then went on to have his second son Jeremy and become captain of the Isles of Scilly ship RMS Queen of the Isles.
ISBN: 9781852002107
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Photos: TBC
Length: TBC
A Third Dose of Witty Reflections on Modern Life from a Grumpy Old Westcountry Man
Whether considering great issues related to the state of the world or simply the choice between a bath or shower, we can be sure that Ted Sherrell’s unique observations on life always include a good deal of common sense and plenty of humour.
Although being a self-confessed grumpy old cynic, he is not one to believe everything from the past is better; far from it, he revels in the comforts of modern life – so long as he can list them with a Biro and not a keyboard!
Easy to dip into at anytime, these 60 articles are chosen from Ted’s original columns published in newspapers across Devon and East Cornwall.
ISBN: 9781852002077
Size: 212x135m
Illustrated with cartoons
Binding: Paperback
Length: 221pp
Growing up and being educated in Kenya between World War II and Independence might not have been that unusual, but Edwina’s experiences are considerably enlivened by her parents whose unpredictable tactics undoubtedly make this a humorous and engaging account.
Edwina’s parents, Chippy and Jean, never saw any obstacle to their adventures, thereby ensuring that Edwina’s two older sisters witnessed and endured the fall of Hong Kong during the war. The rest of them, three more girls, were in Kenya in time to live through the Mau Mau uprising. But they all survived, in every sense of the word, despite taking part in some truly incredible enterprises, that hardly ever worked, sprung on them by their ever enthusiastic father.
Following military life, the family went on to a canning factory, a fertilizer factory, farming, a country club and a school, with improbable exploits arising from each move and every job taken by their father.
It was a make do and mend way of life that, regardless of the hardships and uncertainties, was often hilarious and served as an education in itself.
ISBN: 9781852002060
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
35 photos
Length: 339pp
From childhood days growing up on a tough Cornish council estate during the 1960s and ’70s, through to establishing a bespoke Multiple Sclerosis therapy centre in Surrey, John Hambly’s life has been quite a roller-coaster.
He discovered the strength of teamwork early on by becoming mentally and physically fit playing rugby at senior school, whilst also realising that this was a good way to dispel bullies.
A career in surveying led him to London; quite a change for a boy from the west country. There were some hilarious and mad escapades as he learnt ‘on the job’, but he was successful in his chosen profession and also in sport, becoming Captain of an aspiring junior London rugby club. Marriage and four daughters also followed along the way.
It is when participating in the London Marathon that the first alarming signs of his physical problems appeared, but only later that Multiple Sclerosis was diagnosed.
Following two years where his condition seemed to be in free-fall, and realising the great lack of specialist resources in the NHS, John became determined to improve the situation. Over the next 17 years, with help from his ex-teammates, charity trustees, family and friends, millions of pounds were raised to enable the construction and development of the Samson Centre in Guildford; eventually treating up to 200 people a week and offering 10,000 therapy sessions each year.
It is John Hambly’s indomitable spirit and great belief in teamwork that built this charitable foundation – and this is his story.
ISBN: 9781852001971
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
100+ colour plates and illustrations
Length: 323pp
From her 1940s childhood through to the present time, author Carol Creasey reflects on a life which has thrown some truly tough moments her way, but where she overcomes these problems and is always ready to share her enjoyment of family and living.
Born in Coney Hall, Kent, Carol admits to being very outward and loud in her youth, and remembers those days of the 1950s when rock’n’roll and boyfriends were the backdrop to her coming of age.
Marrying in her late teens, it was following the birth of her third child that she faced a major trauma. She writes very frankly about learning that her son had autism and coming to terms with this. Nevertheless, this situation finally led to the end of her first marriage.
Bravely leaving her husband and moving into a flat above a shop that she ran herself, she met John, with whom she had her fourth child.
Carol describes how she often had to deal with the conflicting disapproval of others against her life choices and partners. John was also married with children, and in the 1960s and 70s there was still considerable condemnation of couples living together in this way. However, they thrived and had a good family life together.
When faced with two major tragedies within her family, it is Carol’s care for others and a consistently indomitable spirit that pull her through the heartache and on to a new inspiring chapter in her life.
Often finding solace in writing, she has become well-established as an author, so it is apt that she now offers this spellbinding account of her own life to readers.
ISBN: 9781852001933
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
32 Colour & B&W photos
Length: 322pp
When Simone set off from New Zealand in the early 1990s, eager to experience what the world had to offer, she couldn’t have imagined how things would develop. The Iron Curtain was falling and the world seemed to be opening up to nations previously cut off from the western world.
Against this backdrop of change, she was one of a group of Kiwi friends who would embark on the journey of a lifetime called ‘The Serious Road Trip’. Initially sparked off by the plight of the orphans in Romania, they planned to travel by red double-decker bus from London to New Zealand working with underprivileged children en route. The one-year itinerary was mapped out, but fate would intervene and the Bosnian war broke out in 1992 as they started their journey.
Compelled by circumstance, the bus joined a Peace Convoy into Sarajevo in the hope of stopping the war. They became the first British-based group to break this infamous siege in June 1992. With compassionate hearts and living day by day, they endeavoured to meet some of the needs of orphans and refugees in many of the most remote and dangerous war-torn regions. They captured hearts and imaginations as they ‘juggled’ their way across borders and checkpoints in Bosnia-H, Croatia, Romania and elsewhere. Travelling in colourful trucks or by red London bus they developed their own unique and maverick form of humanitarian relief where keeping your sense of humour became a matter of survival.
Simone’s personal journey is interwoven with the ups and downs of fund-raising in the London head-office, leading teams of clowns alongside convoy projects and across frontlines or journeying to forgotten corners of Romania. Simone details how she and her fellow volunteer humanitarian Road Trippers offered tangible help and hope in the darkest of times and places.
This factual account is told by a woman following her path and searching for love in the most unlikely places. She finds more than she bargained for. This tells of a journey of courage and self-discovery, where extreme circumstances reveal all sorts of strengths and a pioneering spirit within. It shows what the bonds of friendship and love can surmount when kindred spirits unite, show compassion and dare to dream.
ISBN: 9781852001926
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
100 Colour photos and 2 map illustrations
Length: 321pp
This often heartbreaking account by Carol, whose son, Paul, was born with many difficulties, including autism, is told with the honesty and sincerity necessary to portray the conflicting emotions faced by any family, and particularly a mother, in such circumstances. The overbearing feelings of guilt, failure and inadequacy have to be resolved to enable a happy life with her family.
When multiple disabilities gradually begin to manifest themselves in Paul, Carol learns how to deal with each trauma individually; discovering that a sense of humour, along with the loyalty and care of her family, is essential, as children with severe difficulties react very differently to others in everyday situations.
Despite everything, there is light at the end of the tunnel, as Paul’s bravery and courage to fight through illness and adversity, and become a happy young man despite all his disabilities, make everything else seem to pale into insignificance. If he could speak, he would surely say: “My life is worth living!”
ISBN: 9781852001896
Size: 212x135mm
Binding: Paperback
Length: 162pp
Totally Ted! More witty Reflections on Modern Life from a Grumpy Old Westcountry Man
Well-known Devon author and self-confessed grumpy old cynic Ted Sherrell shares even more of his many and varied opinions and conclusions about modern life in Totally Ted! 2
As a complete technophobe, anything from using a pressure-washer to fixing the toilet seat can become a major incident, and the ever increasing amount of junk mail, or the vexed complications of buying a new broom, are likely to drive Ted to the edge of despair. However, once again Ted’s columns, which first appeared in newspapers across West Devon and East Cornwall, are also imbued with excellent humour and increasingly more wisdom.
ISBN: 9781852001889
Size: 212x135m
Illustrated with cartoons
Binding: Paperback
Length: 212pp
By focusing on the first 23 years of his life living at New Cross, S.E. London, author Valentine Barnes, now in his 90th year, has managed to encompass a wealth of social history from the period leading up to and just beyond the Second World War.
The housing block of the title is that of Dennett’s Road and its surrounds, and Valentine Barnes remembers the families and businesses that used to reside and ply their trades within this area in the 1920s and 30s. These include the local greengrocers owned by his grandparents, the local cinema, newsagents, ice cream sellers, the barber, bakers and others, all of whom made up a close community that, together with a strictly disciplined schooling, produced a cohesive and caring neighbourhood.
Valentine remembers his first day at school and reflects on pre-war education, he recollects trips to Southend, Ramsgate, Margate and Clacton with his grandmother on pre-war paddle steamers, and recalls experiences in the Second World War when, still well under age, he donned his Light Rescue uniform with his companions to pull the dead and injured from the wreckage and carnage of German bombings.
From the simple joys of collecting cigarette cards or playing on 1930s streets that were mainly devoid of motor vehicles, through to the terror of the air raid sirens during the Blitz and the social changes caused by World War II, Valentine shares his experiences and understanding of those far-off days from a perspective that can only be gained by having lived through them.
ISBN: 9781852001858
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
68 colour and b&w photos
Length: 283pp
Totally Ted! Witty Reflections on Modern Life from a Grumpy Old Westcountry Man
The Totally Ted! columns are written by well-known Devon author Ted Sherrell. First appearing in newspapers across West Devon and East Cornwall, they give voice to Ted’s many thoughts about modern life.
Whether Ted is writing about his phobia of technology, his idea for a ‘colander’ list instead of a ‘bucket’ list, the perils of shopping, or his dislike of television reality shows, the one thing guaranteed is that he is always a self-confessed grumpy old cynic. Nevertheless, these contemplations on day-to-day life contain a large dose of humour and a great deal of wisdom.
Sunflowers and Silver Birch: A Memoir
Renowned Lancashire poet, author and journalist Phoebe Hesketh writes her life story in colourful detail.
Born in 1909, she describes her early life against the backdrop of the First World War, revealing an innate love of nature and an introduction to social awareness from her well-known suffragette aunt Edith Rigby. Spartan boarding schools in her adolescent years culminate with attendance at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and she quotes with a wry smile: 'hard beds, hard chairs and scant rations were good for the soul.'
Once out of college, Phoebe remembers her life as she meets the responsibilities of adulthood. From the loss of her parents, to her own marriage and children, and all the enjoyment and sadness that lies therein, she always writes in a forthright manner, sharing everything with her readers. There is no doubt it is from these emotional and often life-changing experiences that she becomes able to write so inspirationally; leaving an amazing legacy of both poetry and prose.
Her writing career is interwoven alongside her personal experiences. Her first poetry anthology was published in 1939 and she also became the Women's Page Editor for a local newspaper. She wrote scripts for BBC radio and television, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Greenwood Prize by the Poetry Society on two occasions. In 1990 she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the University of Central Lancashire.
Phoebe lived to the age of 96, and her compelling life-story has been edited posthumously by her daughter Catherine Robinson, with the inclusion of photographs showing some of the characters that pass through the pages.
ISBN: 9781852001841
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 220pp
19 b&w & col. photos
The author Valentine Barnes invites you to accompany him on a ‘Return Journey’. It is a journey spanning over 70 years and a period of time in which he recalls, in both prose and poetry, the many and varied experiences he has undergone. Throughout the pages of this book we are transported to his inner world of elation, joy, humour, loss and extreme sadness.
Within Return Journey Valentine travels back to the grief and humour on the day of his grandmother’s funeral; he remembers the sadness of the family who lost their parents during WWII, and he reminisces under a big tree on the site that had once been his home. He also remembers helping with the Daily Mail Channel Swim, amusing school camp incidents, some stories behind photographs, and experiences in Cornwall.
At the beginning of each piece of writing Valentine has included a short descriptive explanation of the material so that the reader can fully comprehend each piece of prose or poetry and understand how it fits into Valentine’s particular journey through life. He has also included some of his own drawings and photographs of people, events and places that feature within this book.
ISBN: 9781852001827
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 180pp
The Narrative of a Tour in the Splendid Summer of 1842: Traversing Fifteen Southern Counties of England
The text in this book is taken entirely from the 1842 hand-written travelogue of James Barnes, who, with his wife Mary, set off from Peckham in Surrey to travel in a pony and chaise around some fifteen counties of Southern England.
In following the couple's experiences while travelling in the mid-19th century, we are able to view the people and places exactly as they were 174 years ago: a time when Queen Victoria reigned; the first photograph appeared in The Times; Charles Dickens' American Notes were published and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great ship, the SS Great Britain, was under construction.
The accounts of places visited include Lyme Regis, where just three years previously the famous landslip had occurred; their encounter with a floating bridge at the River Itchen; a visit to Mr Fish's Marine Villa and to the Goodwood races, as well as the house and grounds of Earl Powlett in Somerset. There's also a disturbing encounter with bed bugs in an inn, and the Irishman who lived with his family and animals in a cave about 200 feet from the beach at Hastings: all diligently documented under candlelight at the end of their journey by James himself.
We learn about the social customs of the day, and the changes in society that were still in upheaval from the 'Great Revolution caused by the introduction of Machinery and Steam power'. Here we are able to 'live' history.
Along with the text there are around 50 black and white illustrations from the period and also notes at the end by the author's great-great-grandson, Valentine Barnes, who fortunately unearthed this rare narrative for all to enjoy.
ISBN: 9781852001803
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
50 b&w illustrations
Length: 171pp
Driven Crazy My Life With Cars & Other Vehicles
Sometimes it’s easy to imagine cars are just for getting from ‘a’ to ‘b’ – but we all know deep down that each vehicle has a character of its own. In this humorously offbeat and unusual book we share in Leslie Scrase’s life through his automotive experiences, where Jaguars and VW camper vans are viewed with equal affection.
Having always loved cars from his very earliest days, the 1950s found Leslie with his first purchase of a 1934 Austin 7, which became known as Aubrey – and Aubrey was to prove a valuable early lesson in the art of car ownership and driving in general!
Leslie amusingly describes events in his life in relation to the vehicles he has encountered; at one point even finding himself in South India where the transport was an ancient Ford Anglia.
There are cars, minibuses and camper vans, and a Vauxhall Victor, which together with a Pemberton caravan come truly to life in one chapter as Vera and Charlie, causing considerable trouble for their owner Leslie!
Eventually love of cars and driving led Leslie to start a chauffeur driven car hire company in Surrey. The cars were all Daimlers and Jaguars, and the clientele were largely leading businessmen, politicians and stars of stage and screen, some of whom provide an interesting lesson on the affect money and power can have on human nature.
ISBN: 9781852001797
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
17 b&w photographs
Length: 163pp
In this extremely original and creative story we share the present world of successful author Myra Vilas, a beautiful and confident woman with a baby daughter, but a dreadful secret, as she becomes inextricably linked with her latest novel; an account of a dystopian future set in the 24th century.Readers are quickly enticed from the present time into the future as the chapters of Myra’s manuscript are unveiled and her words unfold a disturbing story that keeps us guessing.
Meanwhile the narrative of Myra’s own life is revealed and we become aware that she is dealing with loss and post-natal depression, unable to open to anyone but her closest friend, despite her outward assertiveness.
As her manuscript evolves we find that the fictional future Myra is creating contains an enigmatic portrayal of characters from her actual world, with names being anagrams or puns of their real-world counterparts, but their stories darkly different.
A Parallel Life becomes a broodingly and deeply psychological account of a woman who is beset with a traumatic and emotional past that culminates in the most extreme despair life can offer.
ISBN: 9781852001940
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 200pp
The news that Professor Marcus Deighton has developed a technique to bring the dead back to life – a process known as rejuvenation – is immediately met by hysteria within the media and a polarisation in society between the overwhelming majority who welcome it and a negligible minority who do not.
One of the opponents is Deighton’s daughter Helen, and another the Reverend Mouland, both of whom join forces with a small protest group ironically called Man Against Doctors (MAD) which is led by unhinged fanatic Mary Fields.
Reverend Mouland’s despair at the total secularisation of society is deepened when his church is sold for the storage of bodies awaiting rejuvenation, whilst Professor Deighton is unable to see anything but benefit for mankind and becomes egotistical about the great plaudits his discovery brings him.
Following on from the failure of MAD to have any influence over people ever more devoid of meaningful concern because life can last forever, an attack on Deighton’s now estranged daughter finally alters the course of the whole rejuvenation project in a way that no one could ever have imagined.
ISBN: 9781852001704
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 262pp
Strange vibrations and an eerie light in the sky wake Mike Hunt one night during his walking and camping tour of south-west Scotland. His immediate investigation of this unusual phenomena produces no explanation.
Locals in the village pub seem to know something about the disturbances but are unwilling to divulge anything. However, he is sent to a nearby cottage, where he meets Bernadette, a so-called white witch, to whom he is immediately attracted. She has a prot égé in the form of a small, precocious young girl named Teeny.
Their combined experiences lead them to Glentrool Grange, home of an animal photographer and his middle-aged raunchy wife, together with her male artist ‘friend’ and his female secretary.
Further bizarre nocturnal occurrences are witnessed at an old kirk in the Grange’s grounds, with the suspicion being that the phenomena are by-products of visits by interlopers from either the spirit world or some other space/time continuum.
Eventually the occupants of Glentrool Grange are forced into a situation of immense danger, where they find out more behind the hideous purpose of the appearances of these interlopers – or they think they do.
ISBN: 9781852001117
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 193pp
These are tales dealing with various inexplicable, bizarre and supernatural happenings in localities around the author ’s home town of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.
Whilst the names of specific locations and the people involved have been changed to preserve their anonymity, many will no doubt recognise the settings in the area.
The tales involve a number of manifestations of the occult; including various hauntings, a ghostly painting, werewolves, wild children, witch hunts and their pitiful victims.
Tales of terror, malignancy and revenge, of fearful happenings, sometimes grotesque and quite incredible are written about here in Denys Sissons’ inimitable way. There are references to gallows and ley-lines, and cases where everything seems so plausible yet frightening that a frisson of horrifying fear is left behind in the mind of the reader.
ISBN: 9781852001094
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 184pp
Murder at the Broadstairs' Funfair (Fourth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
DCI Alan Clarke, now settled in Beltinge with his wife Zoe and their young son, is given the urgent case to solve the high-profile murder of well-known author Stephen Wards’ wife Chloe. Her strangulated lifeless body has been found on a public bench on the Broadstairs’ promenade next to the Bank Holiday Funfair.
A tangled web of suspects emerges, ranging from Chloe’s famous husband, his best friend Richard, their nanny Kaye and a local boy with a huge crush on Chloe named Sam. There is also Vince, a gypsy from the funfair.
At home, Zoe has recently given birth to their baby daughter and is suffering from post natal depression, so Alan enlists the help of Monique, a French au pair. Unfortunately it becomes clear that Monique has her own psychological problems which could endanger their children.
As pressure to solve the murder case builds, Alan finds himself torn between his home life and work; not realising that the two are already more deeply and dangerously entangled than he ever thought possible.
ISBN: 9781852002152
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 209pp
It is 1961, and Ellen is pregnant at the tender age of seventeen. Her boyfriend has moved on to another girl, and her mother is dominated by her father who she knows will be ruthless if he were to find out about her pregnancy.
On one day that changes her life forever, Ellen hitch-hikes to Herne Bay in the hope of starting a new life with her baby, but ends up being forced to have baby Grace adopted; an act which will haunt her and affect her mental health for the rest of her life.
The lives of both Grace and Ellen continue apart. Grace is in a loving home, supported by parents who embrace her even more when they learn she has autism, a condition by which Grace refuses to be defined; but she does have a continued curiosity about her birth mother.
Meanwhile, Ellen’s life takes unexpected turns, but the day she gave up her baby remains etched in her memory. The weight of her decision haunts her.
The years pass by but fate has one last surprise in store, another single day in Ellen’s life that holds the potential to rewrite their destinies.
ISBN: 9781852002121
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 215pp
We follow Emily, Sylvia, Paul and Gavin’s lives from 1990s carefree children through to the years of 2020-21 and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Emily and Gavin become teenage lovers, but Gavin goes off to university to study law, giving a jealous Sylvia the opportunity to get close to him. His work takes them to the USA. Meanwhile, Emily and Paul get married.
The years pass through to 2019, when a disillusioned Sylvia returns to Britain and subsequently wreaks havoc against Emily’s happy but childless marriage. This culminates in Sylvia having a terrible breakdown, and Emily suspecting that Sylvia is carrying Paul’s baby.
Gavin also returns to Britain to visit his parents, but realises immediately on seeing Emily that he is still in love with his childhood sweetheart, who turns to him when her marriage is in turmoil.
Due to the tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic and severe lockdown restrictions, Emily cannot leave Paul, despite the fact that her friend might be having his baby, and Gavin cannot return to the USA to avoid his feelings for Emily.
With their lives in turmoil, and a final twist of fate to thwart Emily, what will become of their relationships set against the course of the pandemic?
ISBN: 9781852002046
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 208pp
Nobody's Perfect (First in the Alan Clarke crime series)
When superstar of stage and screen Eleanor Harrison is clubbed to death, the whole of Britain reacts to the tragedy.
It is a puzzling case for DCI Alan Clarke as, along with his working partner WPC Sarah Stevens, he sets out to find a reason why anyone would want to murder such a well-loved celebrity.
The detectives discover secrets about Eleanor’s personal life that differ from the public’s perception of her perfect character, and it becomes clear that there are a number of suspects. These range from Eleanor’s own sister Isabel to obsessive fan Peter Grant; with Eleanor’s housekeeper, ex-husband and counsellor all also in the frame.
Just when Alan Clarke considers the case might never be closed, events become personal. His girlfriend Zoe and a woman police constable go missing, and the hunt for a psychopathic killer becomes a race against time.
ISBN: 9781852001988
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 200pp
Tragically orphaned at the age of eight, twins Rachel and Diana share identical looks but not personality.
As they grow up and become more independent, the studious and quiet natured Rachel is alarmed when dramatic and attention seeking Diana meets travelling gypsy Jake at a fair, but it is she, Rachel, that unexpectedly falls madly in love with strikingly handsome Neil Morris, whilst Diana has a feeling of foreboding about the relationship and does not like or trust Neil.
Diana’s flatmate, Clare, has recently had a miscarriage and is desperate to replace her loss, and when Diana finds she is herself pregnant after being raped, she agrees that Clare can adopt her unwanted baby. However, when her daughter is born there is an immediate bond and Diana decides to keep baby Ella, much to the dismay of Clare.
Events take a very dark turn when baby Ella is stolen from the hospital, with the last sighting being that of a nurse taking her out of the maternity ward. . .
Whilst Diana immediately assumes Clare has taken the baby, it soon becomes apparent that her twin Rachel has vanished without trace and the baby’s father, who now has a new partner called Anna, also seems a possible line of enquiry for the police.
As time passes, Diana is left devastated at the abduction of her baby and she desperately misses her twin sister to confide in. She is surprised when her first love Jake turns up as one of the detectives and wonders what the future will hold – will she ever find out what happened, in that one terrible moment, to baby Ella?
ISBN: 9781852001865
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 221pp
The late 1950s and early 60s is not a good time for unmarried teenage mothers; so when Laura Clark finds herself in just this situation, it is her own feisty naivety that propels her to keep her baby son Matthew.
Pregnant at 17 and exiled to her Aunt Agnes, Laura has no idea why her first love Simon, father of her baby, has disappeared out of her life, and is fortunate that her determination against adoption is helped when her aunt becomes an unexpected ally.
From the earliest days with baby Matthew, Laura can see in him features of Simon, the man she still longs for; but her lovely son also shows other characteristics which, she learns, are a form of autism. Realising the new difficulties she must face as a single mother, Laura determines to do all she can to help Matthew deal with his social skills and behavioural problems.
When Laura finally tracks down Simon, she has no idea whether he will cope with the knowledge that not only is he a father, but also his son is autistic. While circumstances prevail against the couple reuniting, a sinister act on a traumatised Matthew becomes the catalyst to prove just how strong the power of love really is.
ISBN: 9781852001810
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 215pp
Having spent four years locked up following a crime she didn’t do, Sadie Morton-Brown once again uses her seductive charm to convince the authorities, male and female, that she is no longer a danger to society.
She is anxious to return to her daughter Danielle, who lives with Sadie’s parents together with her nanny Alice, the woman Sadie knows is responsible for killing Danielle’s father, her only true love.
The quiet of Herne Bay in Kent, where her parents now live, is darkly disturbed by the arrival of Sadie. There is revenge to be had on Alice, and the incredible secret carried between herself and her mother is finally unleashed. But her disgust at the family’s friendship with Nathan, the man she had left for dead, turns to unexpected love and marriage.
Although Sadie appears normal, her jealous character is unable to lose those dark, malevolent murderous thoughts and actions; she still disposes of those she dislikes, and the evil devastation she left behind in the USA, long before her incarceration, lurks in the background throughout everything, waiting to pounce.
ISBN: 9781852001742
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 214pp
Seemingly evil from birth, Sadie Morton-Brown’s increasingly sexy and seductive looks only help to give her the power she desires over others; both male and female.
Lacking any scruples or morals, she uses and abuses everyone within her reach, including her devoted parents, whose lives she leaves in ruins. She disposes of anyone who gets in her way, and, between boyfriends, utilises Sunita, the girl she seduced during her schooldays.
Escaping to America, Sadie continues her quest to fulfil her own life regardless of the harm she does to others. With no conscience at all she seduces and destroys Ricky and his family; even selling her own baby.
Leaving the USA for Spain and Danny Foster, golden boy of British football, married to a well-known model, Sadie continues, with the apparent help of new-found friend Alice, to perpetrate her immoral ways – but this time she becomes ensnared by the dark evil of her life twisting back on her.
ISBN: 9781852001605
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 269pp
Griselda’s mother is disturbed when the half-brother of her late husband criticises the choice they took in sending their Protestant daughter, known as Selly, to a Catholic school.
Selly discovers many difficulties in life as she exchanges the placid, honest world of the gentle nuns for the harsh reality of the modern world in the late twentieth century.
In her early relationships with men Selly soon realises that her expectations are far too high, and this is not helped by the revelation that her Uncle Jack wishes to marry her mother, making the bond between them sorely tested.
With her own marriage to Ted, a much older widower, Selly finds there are many strains. Ted is used to his own ways and has a fairly old-fashioned outlook on life. She is left in a quandary: does she behave like her namesake in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, being a ‘humble, hardworking, dutiful maiden’, or will she become a woman with spirit, standing firm on her own grounds?
The birth of a son does not help the couple, with the rift between them becoming greater and Ted’s dominance over her life more specific. And the circumstances surrounding the sad loss of their child bring events to a climax.
Finally, Selly is given the opportunity to change the course of her future, involving one of the first men with whom she had been attached. Her Catholic education still impacts on her conscience, but she must make a decision which will determine the rest of her life.
ISBN: 9781852001551
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 178pp
Rex believes a man needs more than one woman. Hazel doesn’t agree with him. This is the story of their marriage, divorce and subsequent on-off affair.
The War over, Rex and Hazel and Alan and Margaret go to East Anglia to make their lives. Rex is a poet, Alan a farmer, and they and their wives bring clashing political allegiances to the sleepy village of Farthingale. At the beginning of the new decade Rex founds his poetry magazine Review 50, and Alan starts what is intended to be a pacifist farm.
When Rex leaves Hazel in 1960, Alan and Margaret find her an abandoned old farmhouse and she and her children move in. This is about their plans, ideals, the compromises with reality, and what happens through the 1960s and 70s as their children grow and have their own ideas of freedom and peace. Rex’s view of his daughter Lynnet’s injunction to ‘Make Love not War’ differs from hers. His two wives have babies within months of one another and he glories in the epithet of male chauvinist pig.
Here unfolds the conflict between men and women, mothers and daughters, and about the nature of Freedom, the constant struggle for it, and how that struggle affects human relationships.
ISBN: 9781852001414
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 190pp
This could be a satire on every non-Aga saga ever written. For the literal-minded it is a salacious story of sin, crime, death and disaster over the century from Waterloo to the First World War. The earlier curse of an unwilling bride touches all her descendants from her marriage with her spendthrift Tesson father ’s chief creditor, who also takes his estate. She bears this husband a son, then elopes with her cousin. The descent of the moneylender become lords of the manor, while those from the elopement become their servants and concubines.
The estate of Lackmere possesses a floor of Romano-British tiles which are cemented over as improper by the fourth Lord Corbell. Though he is ordered to marry a selected cousin to restore the bloodline, the future fourth lord runs off with a silly young woman who tight-laces, ensuring that the child of the marriage will be deformed.
This son, Edmund, finds an enamel miniature of his sinful grandmother and is ordered to sink the smashed fragments in the lake. He manages to secrete one green eye. Meantime his father, the prurient fourth Lord, succumbs to fleshly desire for the only woman his son will ever love. The result is a daughter who is deaf from birth injury, randy and eventually seduced by the black-hearted cousin Alfred. In revenge, Edmund marries Alfred ’s golden-haired fiancée despite her protests. He also removes the cement from the tiles to expose their erotic images.
A small plain governess arrives to teach their backward daughter; only to suffer at the hands of the lecherous lord. Results multiply, and the manipulative housekeeper, formerly a Tesson, who has borne a child to the third lord, determines that through her brain-damaged grandson, last of the old line, Tessons shall again become squires of Lackmere.
It is a story of much wanton lust, well set against the historical backdrop of the 19th century.
ISBN: 9781852001308
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 396pp
A story of people’s hypocrisy: Everyone hides a secret, and it is easy to condemn others whilst appearing to be respectable.
Amy and Peter appear to be happily married, with two children and a comfortable lifestyle. Peter is a ‘hail fellow, well met’ type of person to everyone, but only Amy knows that there is another, darker, side to him, which is threatening their happiness.
Ian is Peter’s friend and is recovering from an illness which has had a devastating effect on him. His wife Miranda is totally self-centred and both unable and unwilling to give him her love and support at any time.
When they meet, Ian and Amy both feel very vulnerable, they are immediately drawn together and plunge headlong into an intense love affair, which can only bring grief and destruction to themselves and those around them.
The devastation caused by their affair makes Amy feel so guilty that she thinks she must end it. But is Amy the real culprit or is there a more sinister reason for the traumatic events that have occurred?
ISBN: 9781852001186
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: 211pp
A story of love, tragedy and courage, set on a remote Devon farm in the foothills of Dartmoor . . .
George Tennant is a middle-aged man and a widower. He is a Londoner now retired and living in a large house on the edge of Dartmoor. Heather Maunder, a farmer’s daughter, is 25 years his junior – and very much of a different generation. We learn of their meeting, their mutual love, their subsequent marriage and then their life together.
It is a life strewn with struggle as George joins his young wife on her family’s farm located in the foothills of the Moor, with much of their livestock grazing on the rugged Moor itself.
We follow George’s valiant, though not always successful, efforts to master the diverse problems which come the way of a Devonshire hill farmer – and his reliance, ever increasing, on the tenacity, positivity and sheer courage of his remarkable wife throughout all the family problems that such a relationship encounters.
It is a story of triumph over adversity and fickle fate and, ultimately, over the tragedies which Dartmoor, in particular, chooses to thrust upon them.
ISBN: 9781852000943
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 212pp
Set in the South Wales village of Skewen and its surrounds in the turbulent third and fourth decades of the 19th century, this novel provides a fascinating glimpse of the social upheaval of those times.
Fighting against odds Iestyn Bowen, miner's son, fulfils his ambition of becoming a marine engineer through employment from the age of eleven in a small shipbuilding yard on the River Neath. The owner, Thomas Price, comes to see him as a future son-in-law and welcomes Iestyn's courtship of his daughter Megan.
His career and real affection for Megan, however, conflicts with his love of Mary Osborne, a girl from a Roman Catholic family, whose brother Robert is, like Mr Price's clerk Gareth Williams (Iestyn's friend and suitor to Iestyn's sister Bronwen), an active leader of an embryo Worker's Association. They are both also supporters of the Chartist movement and the ''Rebeccas' who are campaigning militantly against the tollgate charges.
More a victim of circumstance and the self-interest of others than his own failings, Iestyn becomes involved in a tollgate riot in which the tollkeeper is murdered. Eluding arrest he escapes aboard an outward steamship, originally built in Mr Price's yard.
His hurried escape is aided by both Megan and Mary coming together to help. But who is the girl beside him on the ship as it leaves?
ISBN: 9781852000936
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 270pp
Children of Another Time: Cornish Childhood Memories From Truro in World War II
Childhood memories from the early years of the Second World War are bound together in a unique way within Children of Another Time, as Neville Harcourt Paddy takes us back to Hendra, an area in Truro, Cornwall, nestled beneath the city’s iconic viaduct.
With the arrival of war, everything changed, and the people of Truro took on work to help the war effort, whilst opening their already cramped homes to the evacuees.
Against the backdrop of blackouts, rationing and air raid sirens, for the children, life found its way into the cracks of war’s shadow. The woods and countryside surrounding the city became their magical battleground, where they waged their own fight against the despised Nazi regime, echoing the whispers of their parents’ fears overheard at home.
For these children, the war wasn’t just something happening abroad – it was etched into the fabric of their growing up, a strange blend of fear, resilience, and the unyielding spark of childhood imagination.
Through a distinctive blend of ongoing narratives and standalone stories, Neville intertwines the resilience of childhood innocence with the history and beauty of Hendra. Children of Another Time is a nostalgic tribute to a generation who grew up in the midst of war, finding light in the darkest of times.
ISBN: 9781852002169
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 298
Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families
This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.
The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.
Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.
ISBN: 9781852002176
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
123 Photos
Length: 284pp
The year is 1789, and Eddy Adams awaits execution in Newgate Prison along with French puppeteer Henri Castillou. His escape is enabled by Calvert, an enigmatic gentleman who, from that moment on, appears to have an altruistic interest in saving Eddy at times of danger.
As a fugitive from the authorities, Eddy’s life takes on a momentum of its own. He becomes entangled with a band of highway robbers, falls in love with an extraordinary woman called Rumer and, on discovering he has a gift for carving wooden figures, is befriended by Italian puppeteer Giovanni Piccini, performer of the popular Punch & Joan street show.
With the Bow Street Runners hot on his heels, Eddy’s escape leads to him being taken prisoner by the French. The French Revolution is in full flow, and it is Calvert who once again comes to Eddy’s aid, reuniting him with fellow escapee Henri and his wayward wife Cécile. After experiencing life farming in the Pyrenees, Eddy finds himself responsible for Cécile and her son on a hazardous return to England.
Back in London, Eddy discovers a passion as a performer of the popular Punch & Joan street show, soon to become known as Punch & Judy, and reunites with his friend Piccini.
Finally settled after all his amazing escapes and adventures, Eddy needs to learn the identity of the man who made all this possible – his lifetime saviour Calvert.
ISBN: 9781852002039
Size: 212x135m
Binding: paperback
Length: 450pp aprox
Lust, deceit and disease lurk within the strange painting called An Allegory with Venus and Cupid created by Bronzino in Florence around the year 1540 and now hanging in the National Gallery in London. Venus and Cupid are nude and kissing lasciviously. Also in the painting are Time; a screaming figure; a person or mask with the back of its head missing and a weird creature, whose upper part is a pretty girl and lower half some kind of reptile.
The meaning of the painting is a mystery. At present it is thought to be about syphilis, but it was probably a diplomatic gift sent to King Francis I of France when he was dying, possibly of syphilis: would he have appreciated a painting about the disease that was killing him?
The Riddle of Bronzino takes a relaxed, discursive look at the figures and objects in the painting and at when, why and how it was created. This leads to the discovery of a new multi-layered solution to the riddle of its meaning and shows that, as well as being a beautiful object of historical interest, the Allegory is a psychologically penetrating image of relevance today.
ISBN: 9781852001902
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
17 colour plates and illustrations
Length: 383pp
By focusing on the first 23 years of his life living at New Cross, S.E. London, author Valentine Barnes, now in his 90th year, has managed to encompass a wealth of social history from the period leading up to and just beyond the Second World War.
The housing block of the title is that of Dennett’s Road and its surrounds, and Valentine Barnes remembers the families and businesses that used to reside and ply their trades within this area in the 1920s and 30s. These include the local greengrocers owned by his grandparents, the local cinema, newsagents, ice cream sellers, the barber, bakers and others, all of whom made up a close community that, together with a strictly disciplined schooling, produced a cohesive and caring neighbourhood.
Valentine remembers his first day at school and reflects on pre-war education, he recollects trips to Southend, Ramsgate, Margate and Clacton with his grandmother on pre-war paddle steamers, and recalls experiences in the Second World War when, still well under age, he donned his Light Rescue uniform with his companions to pull the dead and injured from the wreckage and carnage of German bombings.
From the simple joys of collecting cigarette cards or playing on 1930s streets that were mainly devoid of motor vehicles, through to the terror of the air raid sirens during the Blitz and the social changes caused by World War II, Valentine shares his experiences and understanding of those far-off days from a perspective that can only be gained by having lived through them.
ISBN: 9781852001858
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
68 colour and b&w photos
Length: 283pp
The Narrative of a Tour in the Splendid Summer of 1842: Traversing Fifteen Southern Counties of England
The text in this book is taken entirely from the 1842 hand-written travelogue of James Barnes, who, with his wife Mary, set off from Peckham in Surrey to travel in a pony and chaise around some fifteen counties of Southern England.
In following the couple's experiences while travelling in the mid-19th century, we are able to view the people and places exactly as they were 174 years ago: a time when Queen Victoria reigned; the first photograph appeared in The Times; Charles Dickens' American Notes were published and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's great ship, the SS Great Britain, was under construction.
The accounts of places visited include Lyme Regis, where just three years previously the famous landslip had occurred; their encounter with a floating bridge at the River Itchen; a visit to Mr Fish's Marine Villa and to the Goodwood races, as well as the house and grounds of Earl Powlett in Somerset. There's also a disturbing encounter with bed bugs in an inn, and the Irishman who lived with his family and animals in a cave about 200 feet from the beach at Hastings: all diligently documented under candlelight at the end of their journey by James himself.
We learn about the social customs of the day, and the changes in society that were still in upheaval from the 'Great Revolution caused by the introduction of Machinery and Steam power'. Here we are able to 'live' history.
Along with the text there are around 50 black and white illustrations from the period and also notes at the end by the author's great-great-grandson, Valentine Barnes, who fortunately unearthed this rare narrative for all to enjoy.
ISBN: 9781852001803
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
50 b&w illustrations
Length: 171pp
Forgotten Genius: A Celebration of Past Engineering Craftsmanship
All around Britain lie the relics of past engineering genius. Many of these are in museums, some lie half-buried in disuse, and a few still help to provide a living in the 21st century. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that those who crafted these machines, tools and other devices, have left a legacy of technical expertise that remains intact and in use to this day.
Forgotten Genius is an account of this craftsmanship, acknowledging the determination and inventiveness of the people that brought about the enormous commercial and physical changes which mainly took place during the Industrial Revolution, during the years 1740-1840.
As well as the well-known engineers from the period, such as Brunel, Wren, Watt, etc., there are many who have been all but forgotten, and yet there is no doubt that it was the perseverance, skill and imagination of all these men, often from humble backgrounds and with little or no formal education, that led to a flourishing British economy and an increased standard of living for all.
This book deals with the inspiration, processes, products and mechanisms behind our engineering heritage in the 18th and 19th centuries, and considers the measuring instruments, materials, transport and power which were necessary to implement the enormous changes in mechanisation taking place at that time. There is also reference given to the changes in work practice, apprenticeships, and the adjustment of society in general due to the growth of factories harnessing the best use of industrial methods.
Accompanying the text are illustrative drawings and photographs, all helping to show the incredible skill of our predecessors.
ISBN: 9781852001544
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 145pp
Nancy Vlasto has led an extraordinary life. Born to a famous surgeon in the roaring '20s, she began life in a comfortable Bayswater home complete with servants. By age nine, she was starring in a Pathé newsreel as a young tennis star. But by the outbreak of WWII, the feisty young Nancy had chosen to swap a world of privilege for `a life well lived'. As Nazi bombs rained down on London, she worked in a children's hospital, bravely staying above ground with little ones too sick to take to the shelters. Later, she worked as a midwife and district nurse amid the postwar poverty of the East End.
But the irrepressible Nancy always found time for fun - from wartime parties to going naked in the Turkish baths at Paddington. And by the '50s she had discovered a taste for performing. She made TV appearances before heading to Canada in search of fresh adventures - ending up running her own hugely popular radio programme for children. Back home, Nancy turned her talents to a career as a health visitor before she eventually became the deputy headteacher of a special school. Now - well into her 80s - she continues a lifetime of fundraising dressed as `Blossom' the panto-style horse. She's taken tea with The Queen, enjoyed many honours from grateful colleagues and organisations and nurtured a lifelong love of music and singing.
Here Nancy shares a wealth of memorable stories from every exciting
episode of her life, bringing each era vividly to life. She shares the sometimes moving, often funny and always illuminating characters and scrapes she has enjoyed along the way. This hugely enjoyable memoir brings Nancy's adventures to life - showing what life was like for an indefatigable working woman across more than seven decades. Nancy has never lost the thrill of wondering what life can offer her. She celebrated her 80th birthday by swimming with dolphins and is still asking. . . what's next?
ISBN: 9781852001490
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 296pp
32pp photos
The year is 1794 and Jason Bradley is ordered to join the British Navy on a sloop-of-war to fight the French during the Napoleonic Wars.
Having completed a degree in Military History Jason has been hired by Admiral Blaine, who is in control of the Department of Special Operations within British Naval Intelligence, to gain sea experience so as to research and bring in fresh naval strategic ideas.
Jason joins the warship Sprite as a midshipman, carrying independent orders from Blaine which will not be known to his captain unless he is forced to use them. Soon learning the fatigue of manoeuvring sails and climbing the rigging, Jason is also discovered to have a lethal ability to control the heavy guns carried on the warship.
The crew's aim is to destroy the merchant shipping around the French Mediterranean coastline; something which, with Jason's knowledge and ability, they find they are particularly successful in achieving.
Following Lord Hood's forced withdrawal from Toulon he plans an assault on Corsica. The crew of Sprite are involved in this combined army-navy operation which gains Jason further sea experience, and subsequently Sprite is to operate from a new base at Bastia.
The exceptional success of Sprite's stealthy raiding stirs the ire of the French Navy and they become determined to search for, and destroy, Sprite.
ISBN: 9781852001407
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 280pp
In her third diary we follow Ingrid Jacoby's life through the first half of the 1950s from the age of 23 to 26 years.
Still in Oxford and now working for Rosenthals' Antiquarian Booksellers, she records relationships between all her work colleagues whilst finding a particularly deep attachment to Erica Spender, a worldly woman who sees in Ingrid something of her own spirit.
The intimacies and eccentricities of a number of boyfriends are brought to life throughout the entries and the names of Markus, WB, Alan, Jonathan, Antony, Peter and Michael weave in and out, coming and going, as either good or bad sexual encounters ensue or promises of more stable relationships occur.
At times Ingrid is sent into depression, will nothing work for her? She remembers, at the age of 12, being transported via Kindertransport from Vienna to Falmouth with her sister Lieselotte, discovering that her mother was lost forever after dying in a German concentration camp and subsequently being unable to properly find a close relationship with her father and his new wife. Holidays back to Austria and Falmouth help to build awareness and understanding, although still leave a sense of estrangement.
Finally though, there is a relationship that brings stability and reason to Ingrid. She meets and falls deeply in love with Stan, and as the pages of this third diary come to a close we know that her heart and life have become secure.
ISBN: 9781852001360
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 372pp
Illus: 26 b/w within text
Whilst being a tremendously well-researched work on Scottish heraldic heritage, this is not simply an account of Scottish history. The fact is that this book contains the stories of men and women who genuinely believed in their inheritance, their diversity and their ability to regain for Scotland and England a truly great kingdom; they are the Jacobites.
From the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and James II’s fleeing the country, the Jacobite cause has existed. A strong belief that they should serve the proper and rightful King was their strength and ambition, and this feeling of existing for, and belonging to, the Jacobite movement is something which has been passed down in many families throughout Scotland across the intervening centuries.
The original mantle was passed from James II to James III and VIII de jure, and then on to Charles Edward Stuart, the man known to all as Bonnie Prince Charlie who fought at Culloden. Whilst this latter figure has been romanticised over the years, with his flight from the battlefield aided by Flora MacDonald, this book tells the story of all those others involved in the great Jacobite cause before that fateful day. It includes the stories of many other truly heroic women such as Clementina Sobieska, James III ’s wife and mother to Charles Edward, who travelled across the Alps incognito to marry the man she loved although she had never yet seen him in person.
These individual stories of men and women bound by a single cause make an interesting and compelling read, if sometimes tragic, and not all have previously been published except as parts of family genealogies. So this is probably the first comprehensive chronicle of those following that proud Jacobite cause.
ISBN: 9781852001292
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 174pp
Lady Katherine Gordon, daughter of the much-married earl of Huntly, starts life with a handicap; she is uncertain which of her f ather’s wives had been her mother. Her courage and beauty overcome this uncertainty, and in course of a varied life she acquires the lasting devotion of her own king, James IV, and of many other men, four of whom she marries. A fifth is Henry VII, who surprisingly – he killed her first husband for political reasons – is recorded as desiring no other comfort than her company. Kate is generous enough to give it to him. She also greatly loves his queen.
Her story includes the tragedy of the stranger whose first bride she became, and who may or may not have been the younger of the sons of Edward IV said to have been murdered earlier in the Tower. This and the later marriages apart, the story of European entanglements connected with the desired marriage of Henry VII ’s son Arthur and an infanta of Spain, who later married his brother Henry VIII, make compelling reading. Through it all Kate continues wise, kindly and beautiful even in old age. She is one of the few people to have looked down on her own face in a tomb she did not occupy, leaving her third husband inside it and returning to where she had been happy with her second. She also, though differently, loved her young fourth husband, who was to carve out a future for himself after Kate died in 1537, the year Henry VIII at last got himself a son.
All these people come alive in Kate’s recollections, which include her grief at news of the Scots defeat at Flodden. Her brother, and ancestor of Lord Byron, was killed there with James IV, who had married Henry VII ’s daughter and in the end gave rise to the present royal family.
ISBN: 9781852001254
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 197pp
Attempts to solve the mystery surrounding the loss of his destroyer HMS Fortune, along with the complete Royal Navy convoy HXL 267, in September 1943, lead Commander Bob Garner into even more dangerous waters than those of the North Atlantic.
Although exonerated of blame, he is dismayed that his superiors do not accept his report that the convoy was attacked by an exceptionally fast submarine. There also seems to be an unwarranted secrecy about the purpose of the defeated convoy.
Traumatised by the loss of the Fortune and the lack of reaction by his superiors, he finds his personal life in turmoil and wife Melissa unable to cope with his state of mind; his only solace in the form of Mary Forbes, a sympathetic Wren officer.
Meanwhile the captured Frigatten Kapitan Hinterberger seems to know about the sinking of the British convoy, but teases Bob Garner, holding back on any real information.
As the truth unfolds regarding the loss of convoy HXL 267, the war service of German Kapitan Hinterberger, the secret of the high speed submarines and the purpose of ‘Operation Cloudburst’, Commander Bob Garner shares his place on the stage of history with figures such as General Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler and Gross Admiral Doenitz, who led the U-boat campaign, together with double agent Garbo and the mysterious Committee XX.
ISBN: 9781852001247
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 291pp
My Darling Diary : Volume Two - The Girl in and Out of Love - Oxford 1944-1950
Following Ingrid Jacoby’s first published diary, which dealt with her wartime arrival in Britain under the Kindertransport movement at the age of 12 and subsequent life through to 1944, Ingrid Jacoby’s second My Darling Diary records her life from late in 1944 through to 1950.
During these years Ingrid lives in Oxford, where she works at the Central Library for a while and then at Parker ’s Bookshop. Throughout her encounters with those in charge and with various colleagues and friends, her diary reflects the deep thoughts and feelings of a girl ’s coming of age in Britain during the 1940s.
It is the honesty and frankness of Ingrid’s diary that entices the reader to read on; whether it is her unprovoked lecherous encounter with the famed singer Richard Tauber or her own feelings of love for various men who wend in and out of her life, we know that the sentiments are real, being told directly to us as the diary takes on a persona of its own.
There are times of loneliness, times of desire, sexual experiences with ‘WB’ her married boss at the bookshop and with boyfriends, all interwoven with feelings of inadequacy, doubt, and the myriad of emotions attached to any young woman from any age. However, this is Ingrid ’s story, and in so being is also completely original, enticing and compelling to read.
ISBN: 9781852001230
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 412pp
Prinny Remembers - the Private Reflections of His Majesty King George the Fourth
Thackeray cruelly wrote of George IV as no more than a tailor’s dummy. Later verdicts have been founded on this. A more recent one states that he was ‘an undutiful son, a bad husband, and a callous father,’ without finding very much to say against his kingship.
None of the above is accurate, given the knowledge of lately revealed letters from George Augustus himself and those of his daughter, Princess Charlotte. George, better remembered as Prince Regent and often called Prinny, was in many ways a secretive man despite his outward flamboyance. Hints here and there in the Princess ’s letters show him as an affectionate father in private. In public, his attitude to her had to be ambivalent because her mother, long estranged from him by her own choice, made common cause with his political enemies, and what has generally been put down to caprice can be seen, knowing the facts, as statesmanship.
This charming, gifted and intelligent man contrived, despite an appalling hereditary illness concealed with great courage, to give his name to a brilliant Regency and thereafter to reign as King for a further ten years.
Prinny Remembers is an attempt to reconstruct the probable thoughts and memories of this secret man, dying almost alone at Windsor, old, ill and blind, in 1830, and put right the biased press usually given to him.
ISBN: 9781852001223
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 251pp
It is September 1952, and eighteen-year-old Peter Rundle has no idea of the adventure awaiting him when he reports for National Service with the Duke of Cornwall ’s Light Infantry. Already a capable boxer, he knows he will learn how to use lethal weaponry, and he is not unduly surprised by his posting to Germany. But he doesn ’t expect to have to fight for his life in a vicious midnight brawl, nor does he anticipate meeting the girl of his dreams.
Katrinka is a young Polish beauty, officially designated as a post-war refugee and living in a Displaced Persons ’ Camp. When the West German authorities learn that she is involved with a member of the occupying forces they decide to return her to her homeland – a country on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.
Heartbroken at the prospect of being separated for ever, the young lovers decide on an audacious plan to smuggle Katrinka back to England – a desperate gamble which they manage to pull off. However, the authorities are long-armed and Katrinka is arrested in Cornwall and deported to Poland.
As weeks of torment and grief grow into months, Peter’s sense of hopelessness is overtaken by an iron-willed determination to find Katrinka and bring her back – a virtually impossible task in the hostile reality of the Cold War.
Shortly following his demob, however, fate smiles on Peter in the form of an opportunity to join the mercantile marine service. This, together with a chance meeting with a member of MI5, creates another opportunity for a dangerous attempt to find Katrinka; including a brutal encounter with the Polish Secret Police.
The stakes are high; the dangers real; the outcome anything but certain.
ISBN: 9781852001209
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 219pp
An aura of mystery surrounds a medieval ring that was once the seal of a powerful Marcher Lord. The story that unfolds around its possessor tells of treason and rebellion, betrayal and intrigue. It tells of love too, a love that spans the centuries.
Medically discharged from the army in 1999, Eddie Mortimer is on his way to Ludlow, the seat of his Marcher Lord ancestors, hoping to sell a family heirloom, the Mortimer Seal, when he has a brief but passionate interlude with a mysterious Welsh girl called Cathy.
Hospitalised after foiling a robbery, he finds that the people and events leading to his injury seem to coincide and become entangled with events from the early fifteenth century, where he becomes immersed in Owain Glyn Dwˆr’s struggle for Welsh independence and the part played in it by the Mortimers. In his traumatised state it is he who meets Glyn Dwˆr in the fateful battle at Pilleth in 1402.
He becomes enchanted too with Glyn Dwˆr’s daughter Catrin, although consumed with jealousy over her flirtations and continually haunted by distant memories of the wraith-like Cathy. He is an observer of Glyn Dwˆr’s early success in the war of independence, when the rebel becomes acclaimed Prince of Wales. Glyn Dwˆr’s power gradually wanes however, as Henry IV’s superior forces gain the advantage. For Mortimer the climax of the rebellion is reached when Harlech Castle is besieged by Prince Hal, the English Prince of Wales.
Thus Eddie’s dream is etched with historic reality, though perhaps the vicious battles and his two loves are all part of a dream from which there is no awakening.
ISBN: 9781852001148
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 327pp
A Tale of Strawberries - Shakespeare’s Journeys in Scotland
Pamela Hill has put flesh on the bones of the assumption that Shakespeare went to Scotland. The acceptance of this fact, presumed not least by the information in Macbeth, together with the matter of the cryptic messages in his plays, has been well-founded by many historians.
In A Tale of Strawberries Shakespeare’s visit to Scotland happens in the years 1592-93, when theatres in London are closed because of plague. He tours Scotland with a small band of players.
He arrives in time to hear rumours about the murder of a young earl in February, meets the suspected murderer Huntly and his possible instigator, the enigmatic King James VI. The king’s fears, jealousies and devious forms of revenge giving Shakespeare many new stories, several of which will be used in his plays, including Othello.
The people he meets, some of whom remember the king’s dead mother Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots), and the fate of those who had helped or hindered her and her son, are varied enough to make a kind of tapestry. They accept him as a writer and player, allowing him to know some of their secrets. The tale of the blood-stained strawberry embroidered handkerchief, produced by Mary Stuart herself, which passes from Huntly to his sister Jean, being but one of many.
Following these journeys throughout Scotland, Shakespeare returns to London by Christmas 1594.
ISBN: 9781852001135
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 155pp
Brave Little Dutch Girl: Memories of a Small Child in Holland During the German Occupation 1940-45
The ‘brave little Dutch girl’ was Wilhelmina Harris’s sister Dicky, who rode off on her bicycle and braved the bitterly cold weather to bring back what little food could be gleaned in the dark days of hunger, which were intentionally inflicted by the occupying German forces in Holland during the Second World War.
Through the eyes of Wilhelmina, the youngest daughter, we follow the lives of the van der Hoek family in Maassluis, a strategically placed town. The Dutch despised the Germans for their cruelty and arrogance, and three of her uncles who were sailors made for England to join the allied forces. Her father listened to news broadcasts from the BBC, which broadcast the Dutch Radio Oranje during the war, although all radios were strictly forbidden. This meant they could keep up with progress during the war and secretly inform others about it too.
Woven within the account the author relates details of what was happening throughout Holland and the terrible persecution of the Jews. There were also the many cases of bravery where the Dutch people, particularly farmers, would hide Jews and allied pilots.
The worst period was when operation Market Garden (A Bridge Too Far) failed and the people were deliberately starved by the Germans. They had no coal or wood, no electricity, water was rationed and there was no food. Thousands starved to death, and the first ever food-drops took place by the RAF and USA in 1945.
This account is not sad, but in its honesty it displays the resilience of the Dutch and the way they coped with terrible hardships.
ISBN: 9781852001063
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 176pp
22 b&w photos
A novel portraying ironic insight into the mid-nineteenth century, where a puritan régime persists on the surface but certainly not beneath it. . .
After the death of his reprobate uncle, the idealistic young squire Gareth Seaborne inherits the family estate, together with money only to be awarded if there is a son and heir born within two years.
Stella, the squire’s beautiful wife of Viking descent, fails to become pregnant, so a plan is hatched whereby the devoted maid-servant Pilar secretly gives birth to a boy. The deception is uncovered by the cruel and lascivious Sheriff Stern, who blackmails his way into Stella’s bed. From this liaison a daughter is born, who is deaf but grows to have her father’s licentious ways; and a new-found wantonness is awakened in Stella who, with the squire away helping the Irish in the famine, becomes ever more inextricably involved with the man she originally despised.
Secrecy and intrigue abound as these characters continue their improper course, just as that of the luminous planet Venus. But which of them will finally be fulfilled?
ISBN: 9781852001049
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 160pp
Published 23rd October 2026
A Life Of Opening Doors - Of Flying Helicopters and Farming; Of Vehicles for Disabled People and Rest Homes; Of Bed & Breakfasts and Websites and Automata.
This is the remarkable story of a life shaped by determination and innovation.
Beginning with a candid account of his 1940s childhood and private education, we follow Robin Adeney’s journey through commercial pilot training at Hamble, conversion to helicopters, and a varied flying career in crop spraying and executive air transport that took him across the UK, Nigeria, Greece and beyond.
Family life eventually prompted a dramatic change of direction, and Robin and his wife, Elizabeth, turned to farming in Dorset, where they brought up their two boys, but where the rewards and challenges of working alongside his father ultimately tested both family ties and ambition.
Never one to stand still, the author describes the thinking and research that led to his
development of pioneering mobility solutions for disabled people, before he and Elizabeth
established two successful residential care homes dedicated to enriching the lives of their residents in Dorset. Then retirement from that venture led to yet another success story, with two VisitBritain 5-star Bed & Breakfasts renowned for their quality and hospitality.
Honest, thoughtful and often inspiring, this is a fascinating account of a life lived to the full—one filled with adventure, enterprise, setbacks, reinvention and the enduring belief that every new challenge offers another opportunity.
ISBN: 9781852002251
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
121 Photos
Length: 303pp
Published 25th September
Bowsie and Wowsie love the good things in life, especially good food. Political journalist Jane Bonnd isn’t so bad either. She’s silly enough to think she’s the owner and they’re the pets, when it’s so obviously the other way round.
Lucky for her she’s got them to watch her back when events catch up with her. Which they do when she tangles with a bunch of crazy populist guys running MEGA (Making England Great Again), who are determined to redraw the world map.
Not to say the dogs know everything, mind. Getting the hots for a top spy does make for tricky times. Even they don’t know how that’s going to work out, any more than she does, as it happens…
ISBN: 9781852002244
Size: 212x135mm
Binding: Paperback
Length: 233pp
*Paperback published on 4th September
Murder at Westgate Bay (Third in the Alan Clarke crime series)
Now permanently relocated to the Kent coast after the successful outcomes of his two previous murder cases, DCI Alan Clarke is just settling in to his new environment, together with his wife and baby son, when he is called to solve the cold-blooded and premeditated murder of Dr Ian Jones at Westgate Bay.
The doctor had been sedated and poisoned, dying in agony. DCI Clarke soon has a list of suspects, ranging from the doctor’s estranged wife and her lover, his gambling brother, his housekeeper and her sister. Added to these, Doctor Jones’s love child Holly comes into the frame. . . and then there is a second murder by poison.
Whilst the similarity of the two murders seems more than coincidence, DCI Alan Clarke cannot work out a connection, until a single piece of apparently innocuous evidence comes to light. But is it too late to prevent further murder and loss of life?
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Paperback (ISBN 9781852002237) and Hardback (ISBN 9781852002091)
Length: 224pp
Murder At Canterbury Cathedral (Fifth in the Alan Clarke crime series)
On Christmas Eve, a body is found lying in the snow outside the gates of Canterbury Cathedral. At first, it appears to be a tragic accident, but when forensic evidence reveals a fatal blow to the back of the head, the truth emerges: Jon West has been murdered – and DCI Alan Clarke has a crime to solve during the festive period.
The son of prominent MP Charles West, Jon was notorious for his reckless partying and serial womanising – and often saved from scandal by his responsible twin brother, Isaac. Nevertheless, Jon’s charm left a trail of damaged relationships and bitter enemies. He had affairs with sisters Eve and Lucy, the latter now married to Isaac, placing both women—and Isaac himself—under suspicion. Eve’s volatile boyfriend Mark, who openly threatened Jon shortly before his death, quickly joins the growing list of suspects.
As Alan and his team dig deeper, they uncover more unsettling connections. A troubled taxi driver, Dan Williams, seems unnervingly invested in the case; and when Alan discovers that Dan’s daughter died five years earlier, with her body found close to where Jon was killed, the investigation takes a darker turn. And then Jon’s closest friend Jack also has a motive, having been twice betrayed by Jon stealing his girlfriends.
Alan must unravel the truth from the lies beneath the snow to find out who was out to commit murder on that cold December night.
ISBN: 9781852002220
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: Hardback
Length: TBC
There seems to be a mystery about what happened to Uncle Freddy in the desert during the Second World War. Did it happen? How did it happen? And what were the connections with Stuttgart which came to a sudden halt in the Great War? There is certainly a Lonie in the family, named after a German friend of Uncle Freddy’s grandmother – and dachshunds, too.
The story behind these questions is told through memories delving back to the latter part of the 19th century. Memories which stem from, and return to, the gathering following Uncle Freddy’s funeral, in the room where his young eyes, captured in a photograph, seem to look out and reach through time into the present.
In the short story Grove Mansions, the author remembers her time living in a flat within a grand old house approaching the end of its days. Her life and the tenants within the house, including the ever-present Mr Barker, the caretaker, are recalled with a perception that leaves a lasting impression.
ISBN: 9781852002213
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: paperback
Length: 120pp
From the far west of Cornwall comes the story of Joel Andrewartha, the legendary Cornish wrestler born in 1781. His father, Richard, is a tin-miner/farmer, although his mother came from a more affluent background.
We follow the Andrewartha family as they struggle to make a living from their farm at Kenneggy, their hopes and fortunes tied to the land, mines and sea of Mount’s Bay, and as Joel finds love and solace with his childhood sweetheart, Caroline.
Richard Nettell beautifully captures the real people and places of this far-flung corner of late 18th- and early 19th-century Cornwall, writing about his own distant relatives and showing his impressive knowledge of West Country customs, speech and folklore, including that of mining, farming and wrecking.
This is truly a rediscovered gem of a story by an excellent writer, first published just before the outbreak of the Second World War and out of print ever since.
ISBN: 9781852002206
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 220
Prime Position: A Novel on the Cornish Housing Crisis
Winner of the Holyer an Gof Publishers’ Awards 2026 - Literary FictionThis is a story of relationships and life in the Cornish village of Porthallett, set on the south coast of Cornwall, where photographer Kenwyn Tabb finds he is the latest to be evicted to make way for yet another luxurious second home, as the scourge of second and holiday home ownership continues throughout the county.
Kenwyn is a member of a half-hearted group of Cornish patriots calling themselves ‘c4c’, and he becomes further enraged when he discovers his close friend Jackie’s parents are to be thrown off their mobile home retirement site based on the all-dominant Penquiddick Estate land.
The debt-ridden Penquiddick Estate has recently been inherited by the reluctant James Crago, who would really prefer to work on his sculptures than deal with the estate’s financial decline. He finds solace in giving the management job to Mark Shipwright, an estate agent with a taste for profit over people.
When James decides to scrap the traditional village show at Penquiddick for an upmarket literary festival, it is the final straw for locals, and ‘c4c’ decide to sabotage the festival. But as the locals unite to protest at the destruction of their community, the demonstration takes an unexpected turn, spiralling disastrously out of control and risking consequences none of them could have foreseen.
ISBN: 9781852002190
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 254
Saving Lives in Scilly: The Doctor, the Lighthouse Keeper and their Families
This is the story of the author’s two paternal great-great-grandfathers, both of whom spent over forty years helping to save lives on the Isles of Scilly: Edwin Lewis Davis as the keeper of St Agnes Lighthouse and John Grenfell Moyle as the islands’ only doctor. It also follows the mariners, miners, preachers and teachers of the Moyle and Davis families as they become part of the great Cornish diaspora. We accompany them over the seven seas aboard speedy clippers, to the Antipodes during the gold rush, to the industrial north of England, to lighthouses along rugged coastlines and to the war zones of the Crimea peninsula and the Western Front. With them we enter Victorian classrooms, workhouses, prisons and lunatic asylums.
The book is richly illustrated with images of people, places and mementoes, including the paintings of John Grenfell Moyle, who became a renowned West Country artist. Quotations from contemporary writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell help to transport readers into the world inhabited by the author’s forebears and their own. She pays particular attention to the lives of great-grandmothers and great-aunts, which have so often been hidden from history.
Saving Lives in Scilly will appeal to readers with an interest in the sea, the West Country, lighthouses, medicine, the lives of women and in social history. In addition, those keen to explore their family’s past will find inspiration in the author’s journey of discovery.
ISBN: 9781852002176
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
123 Photos
Length: 284pp
Children of Another Time: Cornish Childhood Memories From Truro in World War II
Childhood memories from the early years of the Second World War are bound together in a unique way within Children of Another Time, as Neville Harcourt Paddy takes us back to Hendra, an area in Truro, Cornwall, nestled beneath the city’s iconic viaduct.
With the arrival of war, everything changed, and the people of Truro took on work to help the war effort, whilst opening their already cramped homes to the evacuees.
Against the backdrop of blackouts, rationing and air raid sirens, for the children, life found its way into the cracks of war’s shadow. The woods and countryside surrounding the city became their magical battleground, where they waged their own fight against the despised Nazi regime, echoing the whispers of their parents’ fears overheard at home.
For these children, the war wasn’t just something happening abroad – it was etched into the fabric of their growing up, a strange blend of fear, resilience, and the unyielding spark of childhood imagination.
Through a distinctive blend of ongoing narratives and standalone stories, Neville intertwines the resilience of childhood innocence with the history and beauty of Hendra. Children of Another Time is a nostalgic tribute to a generation who grew up in the midst of war, finding light in the darkest of times.
ISBN: 9781852002169
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 298
Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Final Lap With Mercedes: 2024 - An Unofficial Account
This is a definitive unofficial account of seven-time world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton and his final year with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team before his move to Ferrari.
Carol M. Creasey is already well known by fans of Sir Lewis, following four years writing on the SilverArrows.net website, which is the main unofficial site covering Mercedes F1. In this book she starts with a brief history of Sir Lewis’s career and life, and then records all his races with Mercedes throughout 2024, including his iconic win at the British Grand Prix.
There are details of events within the Formula One paddock and Sir Lewis’s team mates, and Carol shares her support and enthusiasm for the man himself. She intends to give some of the proceeds from this book to Mission 44, the charity Sir Lewis founded, which is set up to build a more inclusive future for young people around the world.
ISBN: 9781852002183
Size: 212×135mm
Binding: paperback
Length: approx 110pp with colour photos
Published 23rd October 2026
A Life Of Opening Doors - Of Flying Helicopters and Farming; Of Vehicles for Disabled People and Rest Homes; Of Bed & Breakfasts and Websites and Automata.
This is the remarkable story of a life shaped by determination and innovation.
Beginning with a candid account of his 1940s childhood and private education, we follow Robin Adeney’s journey through commercial pilot training at Hamble, conversion to helicopters, and a varied flying career in crop spraying and executive air transport that took him across the UK, Nigeria, Greece and beyond.
Family life eventually prompted a dramatic change of direction, and Robin and his wife, Elizabeth, turned to farming in Dorset, where they brought up their two boys, but where the rewards and challenges of working alongside his father ultimately tested both family ties and ambition.
Never one to stand still, the author describes the thinking and research that led to his
development of pioneering mobility solutions for disabled people, before he and Elizabeth
established two successful residential care homes dedicated to enriching the lives of their residents in Dorset. Then retirement from that venture led to yet another success story, with two VisitBritain 5-star Bed & Breakfasts renowned for their quality and hospitality.
Honest, thoughtful and often inspiring, this is a fascinating account of a life lived to the full—one filled with adventure, enterprise, setbacks, reinvention and the enduring belief that every new challenge offers another opportunity.
ISBN: 9781852002251
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
121 Photos
Length: 303pp