I have been fascinated by ancient sacred sites since I first visited the ancient Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border decades ago. I am interested in how the study of folklore and local traditions can be used in conjunction with archaeology to trace the origins and purposes of ancient monuments. I am an author and researcher who has had seven books published on the subjects of ancient civilizations, prehistoric monuments, and supernatural folklore. Born in Birmingham, England, I am a qualified archaeologist with a BA in European Archaeology from the University of Nottingham, and an MPhil in Greek Archaeology from Birmingham University.
I was attracted to this book as it uses the most up-to-date archaeological evidence together with new work on DNA and other scientific techniques to tell the story of the origins of the British and the Irish peoples, from around 10,000BC to the eve of the Norman Conquest. Whilst there are new archaeological discoveries made every week, one or two of which could potentially challenge some of the ideas in this work, at the moment it is the most up-to-date book on the subject which we have, and as such should be treasured.
The last Ice Age, which came to an end about 12,000 years ago, swept the bands of hunter gatherers from the face of the land that was to become Britain and Ireland, but as the ice sheets retreated and the climate improved so human groups spread slowly northwards, re-colonizing the land that had been laid waste. From that time onwards Britain and Ireland have been continuously inhabited and the resident population has increased from a few hundreds to more than 60 million.
Britain Begins is nothing less than the story of the origins of the British and the Irish peoples,…
I grew up watching Formula 1 as a fan, and have been lucky enough to turn my passion into my career as a journalist. I’ve covered F1 races since the early 1990’s, travelling around the world and getting to know many of its biggest stars. One of my proudest moments was winning a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for my contribution to motorsport journalism. Even though F1 has changed over the years – especially becoming a lot more commercial – I think the fundamentals remain: it's of the very best drivers in the very best cars going at it wheel-to-wheel in that all out quest for victory. That’s why I love it.
The status of Formula 1 legends is not just reserved for drivers, because there have been other big personalities involved in grand prix racing who became household names too.
One of those was commentator Murray Walker, who became the voice of F1 on both television and radio. I grew up listening to Walker on the BBC, so it was little wonder that this mini-autobiography Bedside Wheels became such a big hit for me.
In it he recounted some of his funniest moments covering the sport, as well as offers insight into just why he became famous for his commentary gaffes – which he insists throughout are not gaffes, but predictions that are immediately proved wrong!
LitRPG is special. It really is. LitRPG provides authors with some of the most powerful tools in storytelling. Computer-simulated worlds make magic fully believable. They enable giant mysteries, actual monsters, forbidden treasures, and incredibly diverse adversaries. LitRPG can be a love story or a tale of revenge. It can bring hope, despair, or just desserts. It’s a perfect vehicle for modern fantasy—a setting where the apocalypse can be at hand, where humans can fight gods, and where the world itself might be sentient. My love for LitRPG drove me to write an epic containing a series of huge, underlying mysteries that would reveal themselves over the course of the story.
Did you know that LitRPG was originally forged in the east? The Moonlight Sculptor (or Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, LMS, as most know it) was so popular that its ravenous fans spread it to the rest of the world. The series sets up a number of important tropes for the genre going forward. Many consider LMS to be required reading, but you should know going in that it has a very spotty translation. It’s a massive body of work, too, spanning 57 published volumes.
In it, a hardworking miser pseudonymously known as Weed overprepares and over-delivers time and time again. Watching Weed grow and affect his world is exciting and addictive. LMS is really engaging. It’s an excellent, albeit silly read. If you only read one Korean LitRPG, read this one.
Americans love their Constitution. In seventeen-year-old Liberty Bell’s era it has become a myth. Centuries after the Great Blackout obliterates the world's digitized information, America's history is forgotten. Only confused legends remain, written in "The Americana," a book depicting a golden age where famous Americans from different eras existed together.
Raised on stories from The Americana, Liberty Bell joins secret agent Antonio Ice on a quest for her country. But in the Old Forest, forgotten technologies are reawakening. Figures such as Albert Einstein, Harriet Tubman, and Thomas Jefferson are coming to life. Will the American continent return to the freedom…
I’ve been a full-time non-fiction author since 2012 and have over 170 titles to my name. My Yeti book is one of several children’s books I’ve been lucky enough to write for Penguin Random House. My other titles in this series include: the Donner Party, Nazca Lines, the Roswell Incident, the Kraken, and Crop Circles. I have written another children’s book on the Yeti called Hunting for Yetis, which is a first-person account that tracks the creatures around the world.
This is an excellent children’s book that explores the historical evidence behind the Yeti and Bigfoot. The book explains where legends about the creatures began, how they are reflected across countries and cultures, and how they are understood today.
Many people believe the Yeti and Bigfoot are related, so it makes sense to have them in the same book.
Big Foot and Yeti introduces you to two of the world's most popular legendary creatures. Learn where and why these legends began, how they are reflected in different cultures, and how they are understood today. Complete with well-researched, clearly written informational text, primary sources with accompanying questions, charts, graphs, diagrams, timelines, and maps, multiple prompts, and more. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards.Core Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
I’ve always been fascinated by monsters. Growing up I saw television shows and read books about famous ones like Bigfoot and Nessie, and always wanted to search for them and discover the truth. That led me to a degree in psychology to learn about human cognition and perception, and a career in folklore to understand how legends and rumors spread. But I also wanted field experience, and spent time at Loch Ness, in Canadian woods said to house Sasquatch, to the Amazon, Sahara, and the jungles of Central America looking for the chupacabra. Along the way became an author, writing books including Tracking the Chupacabra, Lake Monster Mysteries, Big—If True, and Investigating Ghosts.
The Jersey Devil, is a horrifying creature said to lurk in the rugged New Jersey pine barrens.
It’s been the subject of (fruitless) searches and scary legends for well over a century. But it’s not an intrepid cryptozoologist or weekend monster hunter who finally cornered the beast, but instead two historians, Brian Regal and Frank Esposito.
Just as Jay Smith tackled the beast of Gévaudan as a historial mystery, the pair trace the origins of the Jersey Devil from an eighteenth-century settler named Daniel Leeds to the present day.
Along the way we find a smattering of compelling –yet evidence-free—eyewitness reports, much folklore, some professional feuds, and several outright hoaxes (including a painted kangaroo exhibited as the Devil!)
As with the chupacabra and other monsters, the true story is in many ways more interesting than the fictional one.
A provocative look at the mystery surrounding the Jersey Devil, a beast born of colonial times that haunts the corners of the Pine Barrens-and the American imagination-to this day.
Legend has it that in 1735, a witch named Mother Leeds gave birth to a horrifying monster-a deformed flying horse with glowing red eyes-that flew up the chimney of her New Jersey home and disappeared into the Pine Barrens. Ever since, this nightmarish beast has haunted those woods, presaging catastrophe and frightening innocent passersby-or so the story goes. In The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, Brian Regal and Frank J.…
I grew up in Ireland, where I was surrounded by stories, modern and ancient. Irish myths and legends formed the basis of the history curriculum for most children beginning the subject. Irish children are incredibly familiar with "The Children of Lir" and legendary heroes like Cúchulainn – we even have a rollercoaster named after him in our only proper theme park! As a teacher, I continued to retell these stories to my young, receptive audiences. When I was given the opportunity to write my own book of fairy tales, myths, and legends, I jumped at the chance. The research, including the reading of the books on this page, was almost as much fun as writing my book!
This is possibly the best collection of Irish myths and legends that I’ve read. It’s as comprehensive as Lady Gregory’s book but much more palatable. It charts the mythology of Ireland from the arrival of the Tuatha Dé Danann, right up to the arrival of Christianity. Written in clear, no-nonsense prose, this was one of my prime reference texts when writing my own book.
'These legends are the action-packed stories - of ancient heroes, huge battles, attempted invasions, prophecies and spells, clashes between the underworld and the real world, abductions, love affairs and feasts - which have fascinated the Irish mind for more than 2,000 years . . . Most of them have an extraordinary, stark narrative sweep, with a marvellous sense of detail . . . Heaney writes directly and fluently . . . with great tact and skill.' Sunday Times
I grew up in Yorkshire and spent many happy hours as a teenager wandering about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, looking at giant Henry Moores in the rolling landscape. I subsequently trained as an art historian and have spent the last thirty years writing about art, from the YBAs to our prehistoric roots. A Little History of Art was borne out of this journey. Increasingly I have been drawn to researching what art can tell us about British history. My bookshelves groan with monographs but these five volumes have helped me think more deeply about Britain’s landscapes and its past. I hope they will do the same for you.
I read an early proof of this book (it is published on 13 April 2023) and was hooked from the first page.
Owens opens with footfall on medieval castle stairs and the tread of time – only the stairs she walks on are seventeenth-century copies and are part of the ongoing mythologising of England’s past.
She covers King Arthur and the Crusades, Beowulf and Tennyson, Shell tourist guides, and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. Her excellent earlier bookSpirit of Place (Thames & Hudson) is focused more squarely on the British landscape but this new book connects to the myth of England, how it has been and still is constructed in all our minds.
Imagining England's Past takes a long look at the country's invented histories, from the glamorous to the disturbing, from the eighth century to the present day.
England has long built its sense of self on visions of its past. What does it mean for medieval writers to summon King Arthur from the post-Roman fog; for William Morris to resurrect the skills of the medieval workshop and Julia Margaret Cameron to portray the Arthurian court with her Victorian camera; or for Yinka Shonibare in the final years of the twentieth century to visualize a Black Victorian dandy?
Pantheons and worship are elements of culture I’ve always found fascinating, partly from being a mostly secular person with relatives who are very religious. I read a lot of epic fantasy when I was younger that featured gods, like Erikson, and I love finding more recent works that play with how deities might affect a world, and vice versa. But I also picked some of the books below because they inject cli-fi or solarpunk into their worlds – something I’ve been adding to my second-world fantasy lately. Because why not create the same sort of aesthetic in other worlds?
This book was a serious inspiration for me when my debut novel was in an earlier draft. Tracy crafts this cool theology where “God” is a scientist and the world his Experiment, but not everyone agrees on whether that Experiment should be allowed to run free. What if God gets tired of playing and throws out the ant farm, or decide it’s not working…? The Nine centers on a motley-found family of characters, many of whom have rich backstories with each other that we get bits and pieces of, which is like catnip to me as a reader (and writer).
In the dark streets of Corma exists a book that writes itself, a book that some would kill for... Black market courier Rowena Downshire is just trying to pay her mother’s freedom from debtor's prison when an urgent and unexpected delivery leads her face to face with a creature out of nightmares. Rowena escapes with her life, but the strange book she was ordered to deliver is stolen. The Alchemist knows things few men have lived to tell about, and when Rowena shows up on his doorstep, frightened and empty-handed, he knows better than to turn her away. What he…
A middle grade novel that brings to life the legends of the Hawaiian people in a contemporary setting. Lei and the Fire Goddess is a fast-paced adventure featuring a heroine, Lei, who is very much a modern American girl. In order to save her friend's life, Lei must learn to embrace her Hawaiian culture. The first of what is currently a two-book series.
