A Village Betrayed

A poignant story of the impact of war on a defenceless French village during the Second World War. Four courageous villagers join the Maquis, the Resistance in Vichy occupied France, to protect their families. They are swept into a treacherous conflict where one false word or brave action can result in the torture and death of people they know and love.  One old man and a young girl survive the savage destruction that wipes out the whole community.This novel uses the recorded history of the devastation of many rural villages in the Aveyron, Lot and Tarn departments of the Midi-Pyrénées. Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne Department is a famous memorial to the brutality of the Second World War.

The Measure

One early winter’s morning, a teenage boy is found lying outside the gates of a monastery. The monks take him in, and eventually, in terrible distress, he tells them that he has killed his father. This story follows the life of the boy’s father and the discovery the boy makes about his father’s past.

The Golden Threads

Nellie was brought up by her grandparents and lived in the East End of London. At the age of 19, she was able to start the job she had wanted, in a large J. Lyons & Co. Corner House tea room in London, where she became a ‘Nippy’, as the waitresses were called, where she also met her lifelong friend Connie.

Soon after she also met the love of her life, Tommy Brown, but her idyllic life was soon to change with the outbreak of WW2. The comfortable and safe routine of life was soon turned on its head.

SOE Agent Code Name LILLY

Mary Dumont is a third officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service working at the Admiralty Communications Centre in London in 1942 where she is recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to become a wireless operator-saboteur. Parachuted into France, Mary joins a small band of resistance fighters where she leads a double life, a schoolteacher by day, a wireless operator by night; all goes horribly wrong, Mary is captured and tortured by an SS major who is determined to obtain both her codes and the names of her companions. Mary makes a daring escape during an air raid, unknown to her, German Intelligence has infiltrated SOE, a double agent known to Mary has also been parachuted into France to capture a Dutch scientist who is escaping to England with plans for the German V1 flying bomb. Evading capture, Mary’s resistance cell must get the scientist to England before he can be handed over to the Gestapo, but first Mary must eliminate the German double agent. Just when she thinks it is safe on returning to England, Mary and her companions discover the identity of the traitor within SOE, they must try to eliminate him before he can return the scientist to the Germans.

Gunner's Island

Gunner’s Island is a post-war novel that will engage dog lovers, military veterans, history enthusiasts, and undoubtedly anyone who is all three. Set in the small town on a tiny Canadian maritime island, the story unfolds with the return of World War II pilot Linus, following a plane crash that left him irrevocably altered. Linus is grappling with PTSD and acclimation back into civilian life, when he is mysteriously befriended by Gunner, a full grown and affable Newfoundland dog.

With a wide array of detailed characters and scenes that jump between flashbacks and present life, Gunner’s Island is both a drama and comedy. It is earnest yet jocular, weighty yet wholesome, and meant to set sail the reader into the story as effortlessly as its northern ocean waves.

Grasp the Nettle

Set in a remote district of Western Australia in the 1920s, an era which outlawed suicide, an unidentified body has been found and police are treating the death as suspicious. The story presents a chance for strangers (the reader) to peruse the very private diaries of the protagonists. Intriguingly, this is like peeping through the coin slot of a piggy bank to count the wealth inside. Elsie has married Tom in an arrangement brokered by her brother. Tom’s job is delivering the Royal Mail, and it takes him away from home for weeks at a time. Vivacious, imaginative young Elsie must entertain herself in their isolated, unsophisticated bush hut. Married women were not allowed to be financially independent. Grasp the Nettle is not a fairytale ‘lived happily ever after’ romance, but a lode of accurate historical data balanced by details of underlined moral standards of life before the advent of reliable contraceptives, and acknowledgement of gender diversity. In those harsh times, things that are commonplace for us today were yet to be invented: like mobile phones, internet communications, and GPS. There were not even engineered roads through country districts in this vast nation, Australia. Grasp the Nettle poses the question: how did people cope with life’s challenges?

A Fine Line

A story of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.

Set between Victorian Liverpool and Dundee and the battlefields of the First World War, three families face the perils of life on the economic cliff-edge, where a single misstep can send lives plunging out of control.

Crossing a century of dramatic change, their journey begins in the aftermath of the slave trade, moving through the era of Empire expansion and Industrial Revolution to a time of religious strife and global conflict.

The world they navigate is one fraught with hazard in which exploitation, zealotry and violence lead to rape, prostitution, fraud, and murder.

At its heart, two indomitable women – lifelong friends – choose very different paths as they strive to hold their worlds together, and to survive.