The name Darking Hundred is a bit opaque. What is this series, and what does the name mean?

So Darking is a place, and it’s both a real and a fictional place. In the real world and the present day, it’s called Dorking and is located in Surrey, England. But the stories of Darking Hundred are set in the past, a time when the locals called the place “Darking.” In the novels that make up the series, that past is part historical and part imagined, and it combines real and fictional characters.

The year is 1800, and the stories in the series wander all around the neighborhood, touching on different lives as my fancy strikes. Hence the “Hundred” part of the series title. A hundred was an old administrative unit of British government, smaller than a county; originally it meant the amount of land necessary to support 100 families. In 1800 counties were still divided into hundreds for tax collection purposes, but the term was dying out and hundreds ceased to be relevant during the 19th century. I use the term to evoke a past time and to expand the range of my stories beyond the town of Darking out into the countryside.

The focus in the Darking Hundred stories is not on the big political events, wars and kings and notables. Those elements lurk in the background and occasionally affect the action, but the series concentrates on individual lives of ordinary people. It invites the reader to inhabit a world that is lost to us but still hauntingly familiar, and to be touched by the trials and aspirations of people who weren’t fabulously wealthy or famous.

In the first book, Coldharbour Gentlemen, a boy escapes the constraints of his father’s ambitions for his future by joining a band of smugglers. He thinks he’s having a great time till the adventure becomes deadly serious and he faces disaster as well as some very hard choices.

Future books will focus on the challenges of a loving marriage, a girl on the brink of her debut who is trying not to fall into the abyss, two brothers who can’t share paradise, and the divine wisdom of a fool, among other subjects. I hope you will be entertained and touched by them.