This week two online travel magazines have published extracts from my books.

In The Culture-ist I write about the legacy of a hydrogen bomb, and the music of the Marshall Islands: https://www.thecultureist.com/2019/01....

And my piece for Epicure & Culture is all about the magical music of Gambian griots, and how they've been working to keep their tradition alive: https://epicureandculture.com/gambian... .

As a non-fiction author writing for the general public rather than for academia, it's so encouraging to find a natural fit like this for my writing. I've got no shortage of good material to use, so hopefully this will be something that I can do again.

Currently I'm doing a promotion for one of my ebooks. Volume 1 (Europe) is on sale at $0.99 / 99p (links below) through to February 12th. The book is packed with little gems like this -

"Santorini appears on the map as another dot in the Aegean Sea south of Athens and north of Crete, part of the Cyclades islands. One of the island's few landmarks, jutting out from the top of a hill, is La Ponta, a 13th-century stone tower which was once part of the Castle of Akrotiri: a fortified settlement built to keep out marauding pirates. For a five year period this tower was to become host to an attraction which received a startling number of rave reviews from its 40,000 visitors every year: a bagpipe exhibition and workshop.

Yiannis Pantazis had moved to Santorini in 2007 with his Greek-American wife, Argy Kakissis. For a couple of years he'd been researching the playing and the construction of the strange-looking Greek bagpipe, the tsabouna. On Santorini most locals told him that they had little knowledge of the instrument, but he persevered trying to track down old recordings. Then one day Argy rescued a chicken that had been trapped in a fence..."

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Around-World...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07...

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/arou...

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/arou...