How do refugee families settle in their adopted country? Recently the BBC published a moving report about nine-year-old Rouaa from a Syrian refugee family. They had fled their home after a chemical attack and lived for several years in a camp in Lebanon. Now the UK has granted them asylum. For several years, I have…
Turkish President Erdogan has announced Hagia Sophia will revert to being a mosque, with Muslim prayers to be held there again from July 24 2020. Origins The Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul was not named after a female saint; the name means Holy Wisdom – a reference to Jesus, the Wisdom of God – and…
This is a sample chapter from my work-in-progress: Gédéon. Madeleine d’Albert “Get out of sight, Madeleine!” Papa’s voice roused me from my slumber. A cry escaped my lips as my head jerked up and struck a brass knob on Maman’s escritoire. Papa was quick to push back into place the tiny drawer that had opened…
Here are some books I found to help with research on my next novel, Gédéon. Click on the images for my full reviews. True to Her Faith by Harriet Gabourel I bought this book mainly because of the subtitle: A Story of France in the Time of the Huguenots. That was the subject of interest to…
Two exciting stories in one book. Conan Doyle has diligently researched events and conditions both in Versailles and in French-Canadian North America, and developed two superbly written tales linked by the person of Amory De Catinat, a half-hearted young Huguenot serving as a personal guard of King Louis XIV.
This is a very well-crafted story of an extended family of Huguenots caught up in the frenzied and irrational persecution under King Louis XIV after he revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It is based on a true incident, in which smuggled documents from sympathisers in Holland are salvaged from a shipwreck near Rochefort on the…
Aquila – Can Silvanus Escape That God? is a work of historical fiction, set on the Isle of Elba in the 6th century.
I was a total greenhorn when I started writing my first novel in May 2012. The trigger was that I simply couldn’t find a historical novel about the Isle of Elba (except relating to Napoleon’s brief exile there) while enjoying a fascinating hiking tour. Seeing the cave where the exiled hermit San Cerbone lived became…
This book contains a wealth of otherwise hard-to-find facts about the often poverty-stricken and mostly unnoticed country folk in the diverse provinces and regions we now know as France. Everything warrants a chapter: food, clothing and housing; birth, marriage and death; farming and poaching practices; relationships between peasants, seigneurs, unwelcome soldiers, haughty priests and the revenue-hungry…
The subtitle of this book – A Story of France in the Time of the Huguenots – caught my attention, as some of my ancestors in Jersey were forced to flee France during the persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The book is beautifully and vividly written, both as regards descriptions of…
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