I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
The Magical Diaries of Charles Lester Seymour is a spellbinding journey where prophecy and power collide, and the fate of an entire world hangs in the balance.
On the same fateful day Gavyn Trevelyan, an arrogant underachiever, unexpectedly inherits a vast fortune from his estranged and recently deceased father, he is subject to a fateful and devastating tragedy. After which he retires to his father’s rural estate, Bryngaer in the heart of Snowdonia. On delving into his father's journals Trevelyan discovers the key to a realm beyond imagination in a world forged through occult arts and ancient magik. Seeking redemption in both realities, Trevelyan, manipulated by prophecy and destruction, is drawn into a conflict that spans both worlds and family ties.
First published in 1956 Dion Fortune recalls her heroine Vivian le Fay, first introduced in The Sea Priestess fifteen years earlier.
In Moon Magic she is conjured as Lilith le Fay, mysterious and alluring. Interestingly, considering Dion Fortune died before finishing the book, its completion was brought about by an acolyte ‘channeling the author’ after her death.
Her play on the dynamic of the male and female polarity allows the story to evolve on different levels, as an interesting, if dated view of a society in need of a spiritual revelation, and a treatise on genuine esoteric practices. Fortune’s clipped prose style gives the reader's imagination free rein, allowing her to influence our understanding of certain concepts and provide an entertaining tale to boot.
Almost 15 years after she first appeared in Sea Priestess, Dion Fortune wrote about her heroine Vivien Le Fay again. In Moon Magic Vivien appears as Lilith Le Fay, and uses her knowledge of moontides to construct an astral temple of Hermetic magic. The viewpoint of Lilith Le Fay is purely pagan, and she is a rebel against society, bent upon its alteration. She may, of course, represent my Freudian subconscious... --'from the Introduction 'Dion Fortune's books sell! Sea Priestess has sold 32,000 copies and Moon Magic has 25,000 copies in print. 'First published in 1938 and 1956, neither Sea…
John and Caitin Mathews have a vast body of work on the subject of spirituality. This is one of their first and, in my opinion, one of their best.
I recommend this title to anyone who feels a deep connection to Celtic heritage and the old Gods and Goddesses of early British and Welsh ancestry. I was especially entranced by the pathworking techniques, a guided visualisation journey into the ‘otherworld’ of our native ancestors. Having undertaken several of these guided visualisation journeys, I had some deeply personal and life-enhancing experiences that I still vividly recall some thirty years later.
A great introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition.
I cannot recommend one particular book of the first three that tells the tale of Thomas Covenant and his trials and tribulations in both his real world and that of the ‘Land’ which he magically travels to.
Each book has its own merits. The overall story between the three books is epic fantasy at its darkest and its best. I remember being in shock for several days after a particular part of the story that involved an act of genocide. I loved the level of engagement.
This first trilogy gripped me from start to finish. The protagonist is a little difficult to relate to but I think this is what made it memorable for me. First-class characters in a magnificent setting.
'Comparable to Tolkien at his best' WASHINGTON POST
Instantly recognised as a modern fantasy classic, Stephen Donaldson's uniquely imaginative and complex THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT, THE UNBELIEVER became a bestselling literary phenomenon that transformed the genre.
Lying unconscious after an accident, writer Thomas Covenant awakes in the Land - a strange, beautiful world locked in constant conflict between good and evil.
But Covenant, too, has been transformed: weak, angry, and alone in our world, he now holds powers beyond imagining and is greeted as a saviour. Can this man truly become the hero the Land requires?
First published in 1818 this tale is a Gothic masterpiece of morality and mortality.
A haunting rendition of a creator and his creation, extolling the unforeseen and tragic circumstances of playing God. Elevated in status from a character in a novel into an icon of the horror and science fiction genres, I doubt there is a citizen of the modern world today who does not know the tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster over two hundred years after its publication.
Love, isolation, loneliness, and ultimately revenge and death all converge in this story from the mind of an eighteen-year-old girl written in response to a literary challenge over two centuries ago.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
Few people can claim the title The Wickedest Man in the World bestowed upon one of the most vilified and revered characters of the nineteenth century, Alistair Crowley.
Writer, mountain climber, occultist, and dare I say visionary, Crowley has rubbed shoulders with both literary giants and personalities of the early nineteen hundreds. A member of several secret societies and founder of his own Temple of Thelema and surrounded by some of the strangest characters one could hope to meet in a single lifetime.
This biography recounts passages from his own diaries and manuscripts bequeathed to the author after his death and anecdotes both funny and disturbing about a man who lived a most extraordinary life. Eventually dying in poverty at a rooming house in Brighton.
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. He becomes drawn into the mysterious death of a friend of Mirai’s parents, leading him and his father-in-law to climb the mountain where the man died. There, he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.
Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt's future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he's surprised to discover Mirai's subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes.
Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt's search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa's most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English.
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