100 books like War Lord

I spent much of my childhood living close to Whitby Abbey and heard many stories of the famous Saint Hilda. As a mother of three, I began writing stories, initially to entertain my children, and eventually published many historical stories for children and young adults – twice shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. I moved back to the Whitby area in my 60s determined to write for an older age group and indulge my lifelong fascination for the Anglo-Saxon period. I took the half pagan Fridgyth character from my Young Adult adventure mystery – Wolfgirl - and developed her role as a warm, curious, flawed, investigator. I'm working on a third Fridgyth the Herbwife novel.

I write historical fiction and survival adventures, but I’m a historian at heart. The past fascinates me and provides the best fodder to explore age-old questions about life, love, and the hero and heroine’s journey to greatness. History has sparked inspiration for some of the most beautiful fictional and reimagined stories I’ve ever read, and transports readers to places long forgotten and unknown—and all without cell phones and internet at the core. Perhaps that’s what I love—a crueler but more hard-earned, simpler life. I hope you enjoy these epic tales of love and adventure as much as I did, and lose yourself in the magic of story. 

Sometimes I don’t feel very heroic. Octogenarian old women have been known to pass me going upstairs because I have only one working lung (I was born without a right pulmonary artery). I’m also skinny and a touch under-tall. I work in a profession (geophysicist) few understand, and there just don’t seem to be a lot of tv shows about—unlike all the doctors, lawyers, and police dramas. I think it resonates with a great many people when an unlikely person makes a difference. Each and every one of us can make the world a little bit better. Sometimes, we need to believe in ourselves…and try. Besides, who doesn’t like an underdog? Or stories about them.

One might read for many reasons, but one of the main reasons for me is to connect and relate to the character. Female voices are very underheard, and I feel incredibly passionate about changing that and creating and reading stories where the female protagonists have strong voices and are not afraid to be heard. I think it’s important that we continue to create female characters that are raw and real and that portray subjects and feelings that need to be heard more.

I’m a writer who loves reading novels, encompassing everything from romance to historical and crime. I've always loved resilient female characters in the books I've read, from children’s fiction onward. When I started writing The Low Road I didn’t know that a couple of years later we as a family would experience multiple bereavement in just a few months, and that grief is imbued in every page of the novel. In The Low Road, I hope I've also paid homage to the power of women, that dogged and patient holding on and enduring of pain, that is at the heart of so many of the lives we live as girls and women.

I’ve been fascinated by the early modern period–the Tudors and the Stuarts–since falling in love with Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, and his wives when I was a child. I graduated from Horrible Histories as a child to lengthier nonfiction and fiction books about the era as a teenager before gaining a BA Honours, a Masters, and a PhD focussing on Elizabethan language and literature. I now teach English Literature at Strathclyde University. Because I never lost the urge to read everything I could about the Tudors and Stuarts, I began writing about them, too, and because I devour both fiction and nonfiction, I write both!

Have you ever felt this deep, internal calling, one you can’t escape from, that even as time goes by, it remains there, whispering in your inner mind, telling you, driving you, to create things that aren’t real? To make them into words that then form adventures? For as long as I can remember I have felt this, and feel it is what I was meant to do. I love, and try to incorporate in my own stories, elements that involve magic, uncommon or new creatures, extensive worlds, flawed characters, a pinch of love, and everything else (including, possibly, a kitchen sink) that can be found in a made-up universe. 

Sometimes I don’t feel very heroic. Octogenarian old women have been known to pass me going upstairs because I have only one working lung (I was born without a right pulmonary artery). I’m also skinny and a touch under-tall. I work in a profession (geophysicist) few understand, and there just don’t seem to be a lot of tv shows about—unlike all the doctors, lawyers, and police dramas. I think it resonates with a great many people when an unlikely person makes a difference. Each and every one of us can make the world a little bit better. Sometimes, we need to believe in ourselves…and try. Besides, who doesn’t like an underdog? Or stories about them.

I've lived and worked in London for most of my adult life and am perpetually astonished, amazed, and fascinated by the city around me. It's histories, small and large, are a constant delight and surprise for me, and its hidden places of enchantment fire my imagination. So, when I came to write my first novel, for Claret Press, there was no other place where it could possibly be set and I chose central London which I knew very well and had layer upon physical layer of history. Given that it was a crime thriller, it had to use those hidden places, which mirrored the surface world, as part of the plot. Walk with me along one of London's lost rivers on my website. 

I’ve always been a fan of swords and sorcery, but Urban Fantasy brings those elements into a more relatable field, turning real-world locations into sandboxes filled with magic and monsters. I might love Aragorn as a character, but I can’t fully relate to him. Now, give me an “average” guy with real-world problems, running around a modern metropolis, slinging spells, and fighting monsters in dark alleys, and I’m right there with him. Urban Fantasy opens up the imagination to anything you want. Dragons in New York? Sure. Giants using the Eiffel Tower as a baseball bat? Why the hell not? Nothing is off-limits. It’s just pure, unadulterated fun.