Geoffrey Gudgion's Blog

I rarely re-post other authors’ work, but Chris Schuler’s excellent summary of John Sweeney’s recent talk at the Authors’ Club deserves a wide audience. Why break my own rules? Well, I was there, and I couldn’t have put it better myself.

In Chris’s words;

Last week at the National Liberal Club in London, the veteran investigative  journalist and author John Sweeney addressed a packed audience of Authors’ Club and NLC Ukrainian Circle members about his latest book, Murder in the Gulag: The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny, a frank, unvarnished portrayal of the charismatic but controversial Russian opposition leader who was murdered in an Arctic penal camp last February at the age of 47.

After he was introduced by Lucy Popescu, chair of the Authors’ Club, Sweeney pulled on the trademark orange beanie familiar to viewers of his video dispatches from Ukraine, which invariably begin ‘Day XXX of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine,’ and sign off with ‘Vladimir Putin, do f— off.’ The four-letter expletive can rarely have resounded through the hallowed vaults of the National Liberal Club quite as often as it did in the course of his talk.

Early this year, Sweeney slipped on ice in Kyiv – where he still lives part time – and heard of Navalny’s death from his hospital bed. He knew the man personally, having met and interviewed him, and was deeply affected by the news. ‘He was a hero to me,’ Sweeney said, ‘tall, blond, blue-eyed, humorous and intensely charismatic,’ but also, he added, ‘an arrogant prick – but then you have to be to go against Putin.

‘I’ve met four Russians who challenged Putin: Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya Estemirova, Boris Nemtsov, and Navalny. In order, poisoned then shot, shot, shot, poisoned, now murdered’ – a reign of terror chronicled in Sweeney’s previous book, Killer in the Kremlin (Bantam Press, 2022).

‘Putin uses money and sex and terror to shut people up and stay in power. It didn’t work with Navalny – he wasn’t tempted by money, he had an amazing marriage to Yulia, and he was unafraid.’ People often wondered why Navalny returned to Russia from Germany after being poisoned with Novichok in August 2020. ‘In politics you have to be a risk-taker,’ Sweeney explained, ‘and he was a devout Christian, whose belief in the afterlife sustained him.’

Navalny’s opposition to Putin’s regime, Sweeney explained, sprang from his childhood. Although he was born in the Moscow region, his father was Ukrainian, and his grandparents still lived there, not far from Chernobyl, where the young Navalny spent many summers. After the nuclear disaster in 1987, his grandparents were evacuated, never to return. His childhood idyll had been taken from him by Soviet corruption and stupidity, and he soon detected the same mindset in Putin’s United Russia Party – ‘a party of crooks and thieves’, he called it.

Despite his admiration for Navalny, Sweeney did not shy away from the man’s flaws. Having joined Grigory Yavlinsky’s liberal party Yabloko, Navalny became disillusioned after they were intimidated into ‘managed opposition’, and was drawn instead to the energy of the far-right Russian nationalists. Although he later dissociated himself from them, it was, Sweeney remarked, ‘a tactical and moral mistake for which he never apologised’.

Taking questions at the end, in the week that President Biden authorised Ukraine to use US-supplied ATACMs against military targets inside Russia, and Putin threatened reprisals, Sweeney was asked if he was worried about escalation.

‘When Putin first threatened nuclear retaliation in September 2022, I was worried,’ Sweeney said. ‘But the following week, at the summit in Samarkand, Xi Jinping said there must be no nuclear adventurism. China’s economy is in a mess, and they need the West to keep buying their goods. If Putin disobeys, Xi will kill him.’

Murder in the Gulag: The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny, by John Sweeney (Headline Press, 2024). Amazon link here.

You’ll find this and other articles by Chris Schuler on Substack here.

 

 

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I ride horses. I know enough about them to wonder how these usually-gentle, nervous beasts were trained to be instruments of war. What could persuade a prey animal – one that has evolved to run from danger – to hurl itself headlong into battle? When I was planning the Rune Song series, the warhorse was a gap in my knowledge that I had to research.

A clash of cultures

I focused that research on medieval Europe, the world on which Rune Song is based, while knowing that other cultures developed different forms of cavalry. The Arab world, for example, tended to have lighter, faster, more manoeuvrable beasts. A Saracen warrior could fight not only with sword or lance, but with a short, recurved bow. A dextrous rider could shoot from the saddle in any direction, while guiding his galloping mount with his knees. Such tactics inflicted terrible losses during the crusades, when Saracen arrows brought down many warhorses before their riders could engage.

In feudal Europe, the warrior class did not consider the bow a ‘knightly’ weapon, an attitude which shaped mounted warfare throughout the era. In the early medieval centuries, the primary weapon for a mounted man at arms was the lance, held mid-shaft and wielded like a sword on a pole. By the Norman conquest, with the increased use of chain mail, the lance had became an impact weapon, with a narrower blade to punch through armour. It was held further back on the shaft for greater reach, and couched under the arm for balance. The weight of armour demanded bigger horses. Warfare entered the era of the cavalry charge, as when William the Conqueror broke the Saxon shield wall at Hastings.

Size, build, and training

The Norman warhorse would still have seemed small to modern eyes. Evidence suggests heights of 15 to 15.2 hands (60-62”) or more at the shoulder, though they were probably bigger by the era of plate armour. A man’s mount today would typically be 16 to 16.2 hands (64″ to 66″). Men’s average height in the 11th century would only have been 1-2” lower than today. High-backed saddles held the rider in place, so much of the impact when charging knights met, at closing speeds of around 40mph, would have been transmitted to the horse. They were short-backed, well-muscled to withstand the shock, with an arched neck, and had powerful hindquarters for speed and agility. They would have uncoiled like a spring at the touch of a spur. The best of them were called destriers – label of quality rather than breed – and most would have been stallions, for their aggression.

They were also highly trained. A horse’s natural behaviour is to shy away from collision. A knight needed his mount to hold a steady line into the face of danger; the unswerving power behind his lance head. They formed a lethal, tightly-bonded partnership; in close combat the horse became a living weapon; a small signal could unleash pile-driver blows with the hind legs to clear enemies behind. Another movement would make the beast dance to the side to evade a strike. Even amidst the turmoil of the melee, a trained destrier would feel, understand, and obey the subtlest of movements. The horse needed to have total trust in its rider, who had to command lightly, mainly with leg and weight. One hand would be holding a weapon, the other a shield that inhibited the use of reins. The modern equestrian discipline of dressage was born on the tournament fields.

Tournaments: high risk, high reward

Tournaments were a crucial training ground for war, both for horse and rider. They were held all over Europe, and announced far enough in advance to attract entries from distant lands. They were highly competitive, and high risk, but potentially lucrative. England’s William Marshall began his tournament career in 1167 on a borrowed horse, but in a ten-month spree he and a partner knight vanquished 103 knights, claiming their horses, harness, and armour.

A good warhorse was valuable. We know that a knight might typically spend a year’s revenues from his lands to buy his mount. Comparisons with the present day are problematic, but evidence suggests modern values of £35,000+ for an unexceptional beast, while destriers with a proven tournament history could be worth ten times that amount. Paradoxically, the best warhorses became too valuable to be risked in war, but were retired for bloodstock breeding like modern Olympic champions.

Real-life inspiration

One warhorse that features throughout the Rune Song series. Allier, an ‘almost pure black stallion, with a distinctive lightening around the muzzle,’ appears in Book 1, Hammer of Fate, and becomes almost a character in his own right in Book 2, Runes of Battle, and Book 3, Blood of Wolves. I confess he was inspired by a living horse.

Meet Ida. She’s a mare, not a stallion, and she’s far too sweet-natured to be a warhorse, but she did inspire me to write of the almost telepathic connection that grows between horse and rider. This goes beyond the simple commands of leg and rein that I deliver so imperfectly, for Ida mirrors my moods. If I am happy, she will be happy, and light in my hands. If I come to her stressed, she will be upset until my mood softens. (And she’s good at making that happen.) Then she will relax, as if she’s letting out a thankful sigh.

For riding cognoscenti, Ida is a 15 year old, 16.3 hands Warmblood who has competed internationally at show jumping. She is beautiful, and knows it, so she earns her stable name of ‘Princess’. She is also the most affectionate horse I’ve known in over 30 years of riding.

Here’s a short video clip of a ride in my local woods. File size restrictions limit it to a mere 45 seconds, but you’ll glimpse the exhilaration of the partnership.

https://geoffreygudgion.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Ida-May-2024-2.mp4Further reading

One useful source for my research was Ann Hyland’s ‘The Medieval Warhorse’. Hyland describes the historical context well, and the evolving styles of warfare. Further research would be needed if you are looking for the training methods of warhorses.

You’ll find the Amazon pages for the Rune Song series, with their reviews, here:
Amazon UK:

Hammer of Fate

Runes of Battle

Blood of Wolves

Amazon.com:

Hammer of Fate

Runes of Battle

Blood of Wolves

 

 

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The mind-set of medieval knighthood

Sometimes, but rarely, a historical document illuminates a figure so wonderfully that they leap the centuries. They land before us fully-formed and resplendent, with a crump of armoured boots in our modern dust. They stride into our world of dishonoured leaders and speak to us of the high ideals of chivalry.

Geoffroi de Charny

Meet Geoffroi de Charny, who died a hero’s death as the French standard bearer at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. He was cut down clutching the the oriflamme, the sacred banner of France, to the last. Among the French nobility of the time, de Charny not only epitomised knighthood but had – literally – written the book. His Book of Chivalry was intended to re-invigorate the French warrior class, widely seen as degenerate and lacking in military prowess, at a time when the Hundred Years’ War was raging and France had suffered a series of defeats at the hands of English and Gascon armies.

I came across de Charny while researching how a medieval knight would have thought and behaved. I wanted to shape a character in the novels that would become the Rune Song trilogy. De Charny’s book, translated by Elspeth Kennedy and brilliantly introduced by Richard W. Kaeuper (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) forced me to re-think my preconceptions.

A few surprises

Forget any notion that chivalry was simply an elaborate kind of politesse, or a romantic dream of knight-errants being heroic to win a lady’s favour. It was a brutal, rigorous, warrior code, requiring absolute dedication to achieve prowess. And prowess, Charny writes, brings honour, the only truly worthwhile achievement. It was the gift of God, won with sword and lance, while holding one’s life lightly. ‘If you want to be strong and of good courage,’ he writes, ‘be sure that you care less about death than about shame’.

My second surprise was the expectation of piety. A knight should live his life well, so that if he suffered a mortal wound he could expect paradise. If he had fought in pursuit of a great deed of arms,  ‘he cannot regret the blow’.

De Charny draws many comparisons between the lived-religion of a cleric and the life of a knight, though he insisted that the trials of knighthood were more rigorous than any religious order. Just as clerics found God through fasting and deprivation, a knight found honour through adversity; what Kaeuper calls ‘righteous suffering’. The ultimate reward for both was heaven. Earthly comforts were permissible to knights in moderation, but Charny is scathing about over-indulgence; ‘the man who for his greedy gullet fails to make a name for himself, should have all those teeth pulled out, one by one, which do him so much damage as to lose him the high honour he might have acquired…’

A touch of fanaticism

Charny writes of war not as a horror, but as a God-given opportunity to learn martial skills and a pathway to honour. ‘And when, through the grace of God, they find out and witness such supremely novel affairs as battles, were they also to be granted the grace and favour of performing great deeds, then such men should indeed thank Our Lord.’ To modern thinking, this smacks of fanaticism. Zealotry. I even caught a whiff of the jihadi in some passages. So was de Charny’s ideal like the Templars, the monkish warriors of earlier centuries?

And a (courtly) eye for the ladies

Not quite. Celibacy has little place among the laity in de Charny’s world, although his references to ladies dwells mainly upon their ability to inspire knights to greater prowess. He unashamedly hints at the possibility of dalliances, even love affairs. ‘There is more perfect joy in being secretly in the company of one’s lady than one could have in a whole year, were it to be known and perceived by many… the most secret love is the most lasting and the truest.’ I found nothing to suggest he saw any inconsistency between this view and his piety.

Honour before riches

Unlike the vows of poverty expected of a religious order, a knight could acquire riches, provided his over-riding purpose was honour. ‘One should therefore set one’s heart and mind on winning honour, which endures for ever, rather than on winning profit and booty, which one can lose within one single hour.’ The true knight sought the greatest honour, not the greatest profit.

It is a theme that surfaces many times. A knight must gain his wealth honourably, for ‘unsullied poverty is worth more than corrupt wealth’. Riches must also be held lightly. ‘The more worldly goods a man acquires, the more reluctant he is to die and the greater his fear of death; and the more honour a man gains, the less he fears to die, for his worth and honour will always remain, and the worldly goods will disappear.’

Influence on the Rune Song trilogy

Those who have read the Rune Song trilogy will by now have recognised de Charny’s influence on the character of Humbert Blanc. Blanc is a courageous, decent, and occasionally infuriating knight. He’s a warrior who is humble in victory but accepting of adversity; his piety tells him that all that happens is the will of God. If you haven’t begun Rune Song, I suggest you start with Hammer of Fate.

Did de Charny ‘regret the blow’ as he felt his mortal wound on the lost field of Poitiers? I hope not. He lived, and died, by his own ideals. One thing is certain; the modest wealth of the de Charnys has long since passed away, but thanks to this excellent book, his fame and honour shine brightly.

Amazon links

You’ll find de Charny’s Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry on Amazon UK or Amazon.com

Hammer of Fate, like all the Rune Song trilogy, is published by Second Sky, an imprint of Bookouture / Hachette. It is available in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats including Kindle Unlimited. It is also on Amazon UK or Amazon.com.

I am a member of  Amazon’s Associates Programme and receive an infinitesimally small portion of purchases made through the UK link.

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For perhaps two thousand years, norse runes have held an image of mystery. Many have believed that they can offer a glimpse into the future, or an understanding of the present. In modern times they have seen a resurgence and acquired new meanings. Some even claim that runes can not only foretell the future, but change it. But what did they mean to the Nordic peoples who carved these angular symbols into stones or the hafts of their weapons?

Here’s a short summary of the research that helped me shape the Rune Song trilogy.

Norse runes; alphabet or ideographs?

Before Christianisation, and the advent of literate priests, Germanic and Nordic peoples were a largely oral culture. Folk learned legends of gods and heroes from wandering skalds. It would have been wondrous that words could be inscribed and then re-spoken by later generations. The carvings themselves would have seemed to be imbued with power, and their significance magnified by their rarity.

Enough runic artefacts survive to know that runes were never simply an alphabet. Runes had phonetic values, but were also ‘ideographs’ that expressed abstract concepts, in a similar way to Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example the rune bjarkan – ᛒ – was a phonetic ‘b’ but also the rune of the birch goddess, the earth mother, with connotations of nurturing, healing, caring, and rebirth. The rune algiz – ᛉ – meant ‘protection’. It lives on in the palm-outwards, upright thumb and two fingers warding gesture against evil that is still used in some cultures.

Symbols or Magical Inscriptions?

So were runes a writing system, or did they have mystical meaning? Academics do not agree. Personally I believe they had deep, esoteric significance, at least to those who worshipped the Nordic pantheon. Their very name stems from a word meaning ‘mystery’, or ‘secret’.

Few written records survive from before the 13th century, and even these may reflect their authors’ Christian beliefs. However Icelandic texts of that era include the poem Hávamál, which describes how the god Odhinn learned the power of the runes by hanging on the world tree Yggdrasil in voluntary self-sacrifice, his side pierced by a spear. Odhinn ascribes runes the power of life and death;

‘if I see up in a tree, a dangling corpse in a noose, I can so carve and colour the runes, that the man walks and talks with me’.

By the time Hávamál was written, Norse runes had been in un-documented use for over a thousand years. We find them etched into weapons or carved into memorial stones, not formalised in texts. But if anyone doubts that runes were believed to have magical powers, they should look at the 6th-century Björketorp runestone, which warns;

I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly plagued by maleficence, [and] doomed to insidious death is he who breaks this monument. I prophesy [his] destruction.

Stave, song, and mystery

Norse runes (there were other runic systems) varied across geographies and evolved through time. Some are lost. Enigmatic rune poems have survived for many in Old Norse, Icelandic, and Old English. Academics debate their purpose, but the great joy of the novelist is the licence to stray into unproven territory.

Most would agree that a rune is a shape, a sound, and that what lies beyond is a mystery. Many believe that runes are windows into the warp and weft of fate that was so intrinsic to pre-Christian Nordic beliefs. The water rune lœgr, for example is a stave, – ᛚ -, and a song, lœgr er vellanda vatn, ok viðr ketill, ok glömmungr grund; ‘water is the eddying stream, and broad geysir, and land of the fish’. But lœgr is also a concept and a mystery, rooted in the life-giving aspects of water, the world’s blood. The sorceresses of old, the seidhkonur, would say the uninitiated have as little hope of understanding its full meaning as they would have of mapping a stream’s path to the sea from the sound it makes trickling over rocks.

The seidhkonur left no records, but speculating on their ability to alter fates with rune song makes for a great story.

Individual runes and their meanings

Thumbnail overviews of each of the twenty-four runes of the Elder Futhark, i.e. those in use from c.400-900CE:

The first, or Freyja’s Aett:

ᚠ fehu    ᚢ uruz    ᚦ thurs    ᚨ ansuz    ᚱ raido   ᚲ kaunaz     ᚷ gebo    ᚹ wunjo

The second, or Heimdal’s Aett:

ᚺ hagalaz    ᚾ naudhiz    ᛁ isa    ᛃ jera    ᛇ ihwaz    ᛈ perthro    ᛉ algiz    ᛊ sowilo

The third, or Tyr’s Aett:

ᛏ tiwaz    ᛒ bjarkan    ᛖ ehwaz    ᛗ mannaz    ᛚ lœgr    ᛜ ingwaz    ᛟ odhala    ᛞ dagaz

Further reading:

For those wanting to dive deeper into rune lore, I recommend the YouTube channels of Arith Härger or Jackson Crawford.. Arith covers both academic and esoteric aspects. Jackson is primarily academic.

The Rune Song trilogy

The Rune Song trilogy (Hammer of Fate, Runes of Battle, and Blood of Wolves) is published in print, ebook, and audiobook formats by Second Sky, an imprint of Bookouture/Hachette. In October 2023 Hammer of Fate became an Amazon #1 Best Seller for ‘Norse and Viking’, for ‘Norse Myth and Legend,’ and, most significantly, for ‘Epic Fantasy’.

Amazon UK link

Amazon.com link

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Shield maidens, or warrior women, are ‘box office’ these days, from ‘Game of Thrones’ to the ‘Hunger Games’ franchises. They’re a recurrent theme in literature, too, from Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor to my own Rune Song trilogy. While researching Rune Song, partially set in a Norse world, I wondered whether the fearsome ‘shield maidens’ of series such as Netflix’s ‘Vikings’ had any historical basis. Were they just semi-fetishised projections of modern thinking? And if real, were they living icons like Joan of Arc or the sword-wielding valkries of Wagner’s Ring Cycle?

Distorted ‘truths’

The Norse of the Viking era were an oral people, leaving few written records. They celebrated their legends in songs and poetry that were sung or retold at their feasts by skalds, from memory. We do know that Norse women enjoyed significant freedoms. They could divorce their husbands. They could hold property and run businesses. A sexual relationship with a man who was not their husband was socially acceptable.

These rights were eroded after Christianisation, when an increasingly powerful church placed women in a much more subordinate role. Most of the earliest surviving records were written by scholar-priests, centuries after the events. They saw the conduct of their ‘heathen’ ancestors as so abhorrent that a ‘moral’ had to be written into the story. Many tales of ‘transgressive’ female behaviours end either with the woman’s reformation into marriage or domesticity, or her death. The skalds’ versions might have allowed the women their glory.

Literary evidence for ‘shield maidens’

So with that proviso, what’s the evidence? Norse mythology has many examples of goddesses who fought, but what of mortal women?

The Icelandic sagas of the 13th century have many mentions of female warriors actively engaged in fighting, from the fearsome Freydís Eiríksdóttir who scared away her Native American opponents by fighting bare-breasted in the Vinland Saga, to Hervor, who became a pillaging Viking in the Saga of Hervor and Heidrek. Perhaps significantly Hervor reportedly disguised herself as man and fought under a male name.

Typical of the scholar-priests is Saxo Grammaticus (c.1150-1220). His history of the Danes, Gesta Danorum, mentions warriors ‘with the bodies of women, but the souls of men’. He wrote ‘there were once women among the Danes who dressed themselves to look like men’, rejected ‘dainty living’ and ‘offered war rather than kisses’. He claimed that three hundred such shield-maidens fought in the Battle of Brávellir in the mid-eighth century.

Shield maidens in archaeology

So what of the archaeological evidence? There are many instances of women being buried with grave goods that included weapons, but then the axe was also a domestic implement. Perhaps the most notable example is a high-status grave excavated at Birka, Sweden, in the 19th century and which was thought to be a male; the body was buried with a stallion and a mare, several weapons, and was dressed in male clothing. In 2017 DNA tests on the unusally gracile skeleton revealed that it was a woman.

Some questions remain about the Birka grave. The skeleton showed no sign of the battle wounds common in warriors’ graves, nor of the skeletal distortions associated with archers, despite the arrows in the grave. We can be more sure that she was honoured as a war leader, or was expected to fulfil a war leader’s role in the afterlife, than that she engaged personally in the fighting. However I do wonder how many other warrior graves would reveal their occupants to be female if modern DNA analysis was applied.

Subtle pointers

For me the most convincing argument for the existence of shield maidens comes from semantic evidence within the sagas. Warrior women could be called ‘drengr’, a term of respect normally accorded to male warriors. It implies that society’s response to a woman showing fighting prowess was one of honour, not horror. There are also at least two instances in the sagas (Hagbarth and Signy, and Helgakvida Handingsbana) when men disguised themselves as women, and explained their masculine musculature by saying that they were ‘warrior women’. Crucially, this explanation was apparently plausible and satisfactory.

So did regiments of warrior women fight alongside their men, as Saxo Grammaticus claimed? Personally, I doubt it. I think there would be archeological evidence, such as women’s graves with battle wounds. It is highly likely that women fought reactively to defend their property or families while their men were at war, but women who chose a warrior lifestyle would have been the exception rather than the rule. It does seem, however, that Norse society honoured women who followed the warrior’s path.

A reluctant heroine

Research can spark some magical writing ideas. Imagine the culture clash of a ‘pagan’ Norse woman incarcerated in a nunnery, and forced to kneel to a foreign god. What if she had learned the ancient sorcery of rune lore at her grandmother’s knee? A character jumped into my mind; a reluctant heroine, growing into her power. Some might worship her as an angel. Most would hunt her as a witch.

What if she was both?

The Rune Song trilogy was born.

Further reading

You can find an introduction to runes here. There’s also a short description of each rune of the Elder Futhark, together with their meanings, under the drop down ‘Norse Runes’ tab.

The Rune Song series is published by Second Sky, an imprint of Bookouture/Hachette, in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. Hammer of Fate, the first of the trilogy, has been an Amazon #1 Best Seller for Nordic Myth and Legend, for Norse and Viking, and for Epic Fantasy. More details via Amazon UK or Amazon.com

Overviews on this site:

Hammer of Fate (Book 1 of the Rune Song trilogy)

Runes of Battle (Book 2 of the Rune Song trilogy)

Blood of Wolves (Book 3 of the Rune Song trilogy)

 

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Let me share a little joy. Hammer of Fate, the first of the Rune Song trilogy, hit #1 in the Amazon rankings for ‘Epic Fantasy’ yesterday. It was also #1 in ‘Nordic Myth and Legend’, and ‘Norse and Viking Fantasy ebooks’.

Ratings are transient, but for a moment it is great to stand on top of the mountain.

And if I’m going to post an episode of unashamed boasting, let me share some recent reviews for the series on Amazon:

“‘Blood of Wolves’ brings to an end what is possibly one of my favourite trilogies of all time. Plot, characters, setting, and not least of all the writing, have made this trilogy a stand-out series. I’m a little bereft now the end has come.”

“I am absolutely gutted to have read the final book … This has been a fabulous trilogy and one that I have adored. The way the author has brought together old traditions and folklore and weaved his characters and their lives has been a full-on adventure. I have loved each book and it has been a wonderful journey through this author’s world and with his characters. Ideal for fans who are looking for a fast-paced, action-packed story that is well and truly in a medieval setting. It is one I would definitely recommend.”

“The last book in this epic and omg what a fantastic read. Another real page turner, action packed and steeped in bloody battles. Great storytelling and wonderful characters. Intrigue at court and beyond is only the beginning to the climax of this fantastic series. Highly recommended.”

“This has been an amazing trilogy. I have been captivated and completely absorbed the whole way through. An amazing cast of characters who all seemed so real.”

The Amazon pages for each book in the series are:

Hammer of Fate

Runes of Battle

Blood of Wolves

Or you’ll find more information on this site; Hammer of Fate, Runes of Battle, and Blood of Wolves.

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I am excited to announce the imminent release of Blood of Wolves, which completes the Rune Song historical fantasy trilogy. What’s more, the publishers (Second Sky, an imprint of Bookouture/Hachette) have redesigned the covers for the whole series. Personally, I think they look great together:

 

 

Several book reviewers and bloggers have helped to promote the ‘cover reveal’, including The Plain-Spoken Pen. She, bless her, commented “I love this series… I wouldn’t care if the third book came covered in a brown paper bag, I’d be champing at the bit to read it. But this is a very cool cover!”

The Plain-Spoken pen will publish her review on 27th October. Other reviews have already appeared on the review site NetGalley. You can see them here and I’m delighted to say that so far they are all 5*.

There’s a synopsis of Blood of Wolves here, and you can pre-order the ebook on Amazon here. Release day is Friday, 27th October and it is coming out in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats.

For more about Hammer of Fate, the first of the Rune Song series, you’ll find the synopsis here and the Amazon page here. For Runes of Battle, the second book, click synopsis or Amazon.

Enjoy! And if you need a little encouragement, let me share snippets from those early reviews:

“The last book in this epic and omg what a read. Another real page turner, action packed bloody battles. Great storytelling and great characters who I feel I really know… Highly, highly recommended.”

“This has been an amazing trilogy. I have been captivated and completely absorbed the whole way through…”

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Hammer of Fate will soon be ready to go to print, ready for my heroine Adelais to be sent out into the world on 1st June.

Publishers Second Sky (an imprint of Bookoutoure/Hachette) sent out ‘Advanced Review Copies’ of Hammer of Fate in February, and the first reviews are coming in. I’m particularly pleased with this one: ‘There is something about a good fantasy book that always grabs me and lures me in, holds me hostage until I can finish it, and then leaves me pining for more. … I can only urge you to pick up this book and thrive in it…’

If you’d like to pre-order an ebook, it’s available here.

The final stages:

Editing is hard work. The finished book will be the end product not only of years of writing but of four cycles of editing:

Firstly my editor makes ‘structural edit’ suggestions, related to plot and characterisation. We then hand the agreed changes to a ‘copy editor’ for more nuanced revision. Line editing follows. Hammer of Fate is now at the final, proofreading stage when we discover infuriating glitches. Like runes, which are important to the plot. Kindle transposes them, turning the rune bjarkan, for example, from a correctly typeset ‘ᛒ’ into ‘B‘. The rune’s esoteric meaning of renewal becomes just ‘buh’. I am so glad I have a publisher to help.

Book 2 in the series has just finished the copy editing phase, and by my count the edits on the first two novels in the series have taken me about 110 full days of work since October. All this editing has left Book 3 on a cliff edge, with a key character facing a very tricky situation and begging me to ‘please please please come back and write me out of this’.

No pressure, then. You’ll find more about Hammer of Fate, including the publisher’s description here. Sign up to my newsletter here to hear announcements about subsequent releases in the Rune Song series.

 

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I’m posting great news that I shared with my mailing list last week (sign up if you want to be the first to know!). Since finishing Draca I’ve been writing in a new direction; the ‘historical fantasy’ domain of authors such as George R R Martin (Game of Thrones), Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher), and Mark Lawrence (The Book of the Ancestor). A character had come into my mind as if she had always been there, waiting for her story to be told; a courageous young woman, raised as a pagan but incarcerated in a nunnery and forced to kneel to a foreign god. The words flowed. One book became two, then three. The trilogy acquired a name: Rune Song.

Last August Bookouture, the digital-first subsidiary of publishing group Hachette, acquired the world-wide English language rights to the series via my agent Ian Drury at Sheil Land. However they embargoed announcements until they launched their new imprint for the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) genres, Second Sky. That was last week’s hot news in the publishing world, and I’m now free to share my own excitement.

The first book in the Rune Song series, Hammer of Fate, will be released on 1st June in print, ebook, and audiobook formats. Two other titles will follow during the summer.

Jack Renninson at Second Sky told the press ‘it took me just one evening to blaze through the brilliant first book in Geoff’s new trilogy. Adelais is an astonishing heroine – angry, defiant and immensely charismatic – and the dangerous world that she inhabits seems vividly and completely real. This story is an incredible achievement and I’m certain that fans of exciting, character-driven fantasy will be hooked.’

There’s a slightly fuller description of Hammer of Fate and an extract here.If you want to make Second Sky (and me) very happy, the ebook of Hammer of Fate can be pre-ordered now for just £1.99 from Amazon UK or $2.47 from Amazon.com. Print and audio book pricing will be announced later.

Welcome to the world of Adelais de Vries, a woman who some adore as an angel and others hunt as a witch.

She may be both.

Happy reading!

 

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Late last year I was invited to join the shortlisting panel for the 2022 Best First Novel Award, the UK’s longest-running prize for debut fiction. It has been a delight as well as a significant burden of reading. Over the next few weeks I’m going to highlight some BFNA gems by authors that are, by definition, little known. This won’t be the long-list (pictured below) since in the nature of panel discussions not all the books I thought worthy made the cut. However they resonated with me enough to want to share them.

The Best First Novel Award for debut fiction

First, the award. Inaugurated in 1954, the £2,500 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award is almost the oldest literary prize in Britain. Each publisher may submit two works of debut fiction, so between us the panel had about ninety novels to read. This year’s winner guest adjudicator was Alex Wheatle, who selected the winner from the panel’s shortlist:

Yvonne Bailey-Smith, The Day I Fell off My Island (Myriad Editions)

A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches (Granta Books)

Catherine Menon, Fragile Monsters (Viking)

Lucy Jago, A Net for Small Fishes (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Melody Razak, Moth (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Tish Delaney, Before My Actual Heart Breaks (Hutchinson Heinemann)

And the winner was: Tish Delaney, Before My Actual Heart Breaks

I hadn’t expected to like this one so much; the context made me nervous. It’s a 25 year drama through the eyes of one woman in an intensely Republican, Catholic family near Omagh. It shows I should read outside my comfort zone more.

We follow the woman from her childhood with an emotionally abusive mother through to empty-nester, and it takes place almost entirely within the scattered farming community of one remote valley. It’s a story of love; parental, sibling, and amorous, and it hinges on communication and mis-communication, with heavy doses of Catholic morality, guilt, and hypocrisy.

I truly engaged with this story. The language is straightforward, unflowery, and only lightly sprinkled with Irish vernacular. The mother’s abuse sets the context for much that happens later, including a disastrous adolescence. By then I wanted to stand in the girl’s way shouting ‘don’t do that’. Before she is long into her marriage I was just as keen to slap some sense into her, but then we would not have a story. For a while it is a sharp portrait of a woman so wrapped around her own wounds that she does not realise that silence can cut deeper than words.

There’s a rich cast of characters, all well drawn, and enough humour to lift what could be a depressing tale. The reader ends up laughing, loving, and shouting with them all as if we were part of the ‘craic’. Brilliant.

 

One that also deserved to win: Lucy Jago, A Net for Small Fishes

A Net for Small Fishes centres on the relationship between Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, and Mrs Anne Turner in the period before and after the ‘Overbury Scandal’ of the early 17th century. Theirs was was an unlikely friendship; a daughter of one of the noblest families in England who is enduring a forced marriage, and a commoner fourteen years her senior, the widow of a doctor. They are united only in their Catholicism. The countess lives in a world of political intrigue at the corrupt, despotic court of James I and VI where huge extravagance and debt are normal. The widow clings to her gentility on the brink of destitution, but becomes useful as a trusted go-between and confidante. In time, their friendship develops into something akin to love, but as ‘Frankie’ places ever greater demands on Anne, and the mighty Howards’ grip on power loosens, that love it tested.A Net for Small Fishes is historical fiction of a very high calibre, one of those rare books where the boundary between meticulously researched history and the writer’s imagination is invisible. I would rank this alongside Hilary Mantel for its ability to immerse the reader in the stinking reality of an era, and with Sarah Waters for its portrayal of friendship between two women.The Overbury Scandal and its aftermath are matters of historical record. Jago brings fleshes out the historical characters with motivations and emotion; they take life. Anne Turner ‘tells’ her own story as a woman we know is condemned to die. It is worth resisting the urge to research the historical record to discover the conclusion.More to comeNext week, two more brilliant examples of debut fiction:Oana Aristide, Under the Blue, (Serpent’s Tail – Profile)A K Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches , Granta Books

 

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