The Lazarus Prophecy is published in the UK and America as a physical book on Thursday of this week. I'm really pleased about this for two reasons. The first is that I'm old-fashioned enough to think a book hasn't really arrived until it manifests in three-dimensional form with wood-pulped pages bearing a black-inked font. The second is that publishers Bloomsbury Reader told me it would only be produced in physical form if it did sufficiently well as a download first.

The audiobook of The Memory of Trees came out last week and is outselling The Lazarus Prophecy audiobook pretty comfortably. I'm not really surprised by this. Nor does it bother me. Prophecy is a much more ambitious novel on an altogether bigger scale than Trees. But I think Trees is probably the most atmospheric story I've written and I'm really proud of The Forest of Mourning as a fictional location. Plus there's David Rintoul doing the reading. His past performances of my novels have left me stunned at just how much he brings to them.

I'll conclude on a technical note. Someone joked last week that the thorn bush at Gibbet Mourning in Trees had given him nightmares. I replied that it was a real challenge to describe. I won't resort to a thesaurus on principle - if I'm not familiar with the word, I can't expect the reader to be and so won't use it. But I'm not exactly an expert at botany. Consequently I almost ran out of adjectives describing that bush. A challenge, but a rewarding one, made so by the largely positive reaction from readers my thorny creation has so far provoked.