Why am I passionate about this?

I’m the sort of writer who constantly asks “what kind of story could I set here?” A quiet copse, a busy mall, a shabby wedding venue, all locations have their own stories to tell in addition to those of the characters who inhabit them. Stories work best when the location is the pivot around which everything else happens. This is doubly true for secondary world fantasy because, when you’re creating a world, you don’t just tease the story out of its locations—you can weave it into the fabric of the place. Which is how I created the world of Queen Of Clouds, down to its very motes.


I wrote

Queen of Clouds

By Neil Williamson,

Book cover of Queen of Clouds

What is my book about?

Queen Of Clouds is a fantasy novel featuring charming wooden automata, ink that compels the reader’s obedience, and sentient weather…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Threading the Labryinth

Neil Williamson Why did I love this book?

This wonderful novel begins with the inheritance of an ancestral pile in rural England and slowly, by twists and turns, reveals the story of the once ornate house and gardens down the centuries. Ladies and lords of the manor, gardeners and servants, painters, photographers, and WWII land girls all flit fleetingly through its pages, but the novel’s heart is the mysterious walled garden whose secrets only a very few get to witness.

By Tiffani Angus,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Threading the Labryinth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

American owner of a failing gallery, Toni, is unexpectedly called to England when she inherits a manor house in Hertfordshire from a mysterious lost relative.

What she really needs is something valuable to sell, so she can save her business. But, leaving the New Mexico desert behind, all she finds is a crumbling building, overgrown gardens, and a wealth of historical paperwork that needs cataloguing.

Soon she is immersed in the history of the house, and all the people who tended the gardens over the centuries: the gardens that seem to change in the twilight; the ghost of a fighter…


Book cover of Dark River

Neil Williamson Why did I love this book?

This thrilling novel explores what we would do in the face of eco-catastrophe in a really unique way. Two young women—one in Doggerland in 6200 BC and the other in London in 2156find themselves fleeing to save themselves and their children as the world they’ve always known becomes uninhabitable. The trick of using the same landscape, separated by eight thousand years brings a wonderful sense of perspective to the story, and to our own place in the world.

By Rym Kechacha,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Dark River as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Doggerland, 6200 BC. As rivers rise, young mother Shaye follows her family to a sacred oak grove, hoping that an ancient ritual will save their way of life.

London, AD 2156. In a city ravaged by the rising Thames, Shante hopes for a visa that will allow her to flee with her four-year-old son to the more prosperous north.

Two mothers, more than 8,000 years apart, struggle to save their children from a bleak future as the odds stack against them.

At the sacred oak grove, Shaye faces a revelation that cuts to the core of who she is; in…


Book cover of The Limits of Enchantment

Neil Williamson Why did I love this book?

This stunning coming-of-age story is set in the rural Midlands in the 1960s. Fern is apprenticed to Mammy, the village wise woman, but the influence of modernitymedicines, the National Health Service, the increased connectivity afforded by motor carspells the end for their traditional way of life. In a novel without any other overt fantastical elements, one magnificent scene where Fern, torn between loyalty to the past and the pull of the future, opens herself to the latent wonders of the woods and fields and hedgerows around her, is the key to understanding what the world loses with the passing of old knowledge. 

By Graham Joyce,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Limits of Enchantment as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The story of a young woman in the midlands in 1966. A woman who may be a witch. She and her family live on the margins of society. Nevertheless her family life is stifling and she seeks freedom with more outsiders, a group of beatniks, but fights to find acceptance there also. And all the time she is struggling with her fey powers. Isabel Allende said of Joyce's previous novel, The Facts of Life: 'This is the kind of book I love to read! I have not been so charmed by a novel in a long time'.


Book cover of Luckenbooth

Neil Williamson Why did I love this book?

This novel tells the stories of the residents of an Edinburgh close across the span of the twentieth century. Fagan’s Edinburgh is wonderfully, atmospheric but it’s the close itself and the goings on in its cheek-by-jowl apartments following the arrival of Jessie, sold by her father (whom she has killed) into sexual slavery, and with revenge on her mind, that permeates this murderous, richly gothic story.

By Jenni Fagan,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Luckenbooth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Featured in Damian Barr''s picks for 2021
Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2021
Chosen as one of the Best Books of 2021 in the Telegraph

''If this addictive slice of Edinburgh Gothic isn''t on all prize lists, there is no justice.'' iNews

''Over time, 10 Luckenbooth Close sinks from grand residence to condemned squat with secrets seething in its walls ... Luckenbooth is a place of compacted time, where the past manifests as unquiet ghosts and the future bleeds into the present ... There''s a force in Luckenbooth''s bizarre assemblage.'' The Times

''Definitely going to be one of my…


Book cover of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

Neil Williamson Why did I love this book?

The setting of this masterful story is contemporary London, but one dominated by water: rain, rivers, canal boats, ponds. As the novel progresses, the characters’ only partially successful attempts to connect feel hampered by the decreasing definition of the boundaries between land and water. A sense of hopeless inevitability pervades every page, that in the world of this drowning London something has changed. Something irreversible.

By M. John Harrison,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020*

*A New Statesman Book of the Year*

'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis

'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing

'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman

'An extraordinary experience' William Gibson

Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen.…


Explore my book 😀

Queen of Clouds

By Neil Williamson,

Book cover of Queen of Clouds

What is my book about?

Queen Of Clouds is a fantasy novel featuring charming wooden automata, ink that compels the reader’s obedience, and sentient weather hell-bent on lashing out at just about everybody that upsets it. All of this is made possible by tiny particlesmotesthat suffuse the landscape, and which people have found myriad ways of turning to their own personal gain. At its heart, Queen Of Clouds is a novel about catastrophic climate change and the frustration of trying to do what’s right when the people with the power to effect change are those with a vested interest in the status quo.

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Defection in Prague

By Ray C Doyle,

Book cover of Defection in Prague

Ray C Doyle Author Of Lara's Secret

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.

Ray's book list on mysteries with complicated plots and risky characters

What is my book about?

Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.

Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…

Defection in Prague

By Ray C Doyle,

What is this book about?

Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.

Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…


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