SHADOWBORNE

by Roger Norman

From the author of ALBION'S DREAM and RED DIE, SHADOWBORNE is Roger Norman’s latest novel, set in Sherborne in 1877. In the library of the school Sherborne School is a 16th century manuscript, The Book Of Shadowborne, giving a history of Sherborne which suggests an alternative origin for the town’s name, a different reason for Aldhelm’s appointment as bishop and a new explanation for the siting of the Bishop’s palace. Grindlay, the school librarian, has made a translation of this rare document which comes to the attention of one of his most gifted scholars, Louis Yeoman.

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 2012

About the author

I wrote Albion's Dream in six months; Red Die took me 18 years (!), Shadowborne also went through many revisions. These made the dice trilogy, ghost stories in which the present is haunted by the past. Treetime was written for younger children and led to my fruitful relationship with the Istanbul publishers Yapi Kredi, who have published some of my stories directly into Turkish. Treetime is in its 20th edition in Turkey. My new book is a collection of short stories called Borrowed Voices, in which the only ghosts are literary.

I spent the 1980s in Greece and have lived in Turkey for much of the last twenty years. Before all that I was a Dorset lad and there's been an element of exile in these long sojourns abroad. Perhaps writing about the rivers and tracks and woodlands of the Blackmore Vale as they were fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is my way of keeping in touch with the loveliest of English counties.

For a dozen years during the late nineties and early noughties I worked for the UN as an educational consultant and am deeply grateful to that vast, cumbersome, irritating and irreplaceable organization for the opportunity to work in some of the most astonishingly beautiful places you can imagine - Vietnam by the Chinese border, Uganda under the Mountains of the Moon, Nepal-without-cars and the highlands of Lesotho.

My English books are distributed by the Sundial Press (www.sundialpress.co.uk), a small and friendly publishing house with a list where a handful of living authors are lucky enough to rub shoulders with the likes of Llewelyn Powys and AE Coppard.

Anyone contacting me via the Goodreads website will get a proper reply, even if not at once.