Category Archives: fiction

Bentwood
Jan Roberts

Published: Nov 2025
Paperback: 240 pages
Price: £12.00
ISBN: 978-1-915972-92-7
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Available from
Amazon
Bentwood
by Jan Roberts

A chair is just a chair ...

or is it?

This debut collection of fifteen short stories explores whether there is much more to this everyday piece of furniture than it first appears. The chairs in question are all ‘Bentwood’, the innovative creations of the designer Michael Thonet, first introduced in the mid-1830s. As each new character is revealed, and their individual loss becomes apparent, it is evident that chairs are not just for sitting upon and they carry their own history etched within the wood.

One chair becomes a weapon when rival females clash; another a makeshift stage for an older woman, whose decisions have never been her own; a Bentwood rocker is a symbol of independence and choice, and a magnificent butterfly chair befriends a troubled child. In the final story, this assortment of chairs is brought together around one grand table, where Walter, Michael Thonet’s fictitious butler, prepares for a dinner party he will never forget.



Born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, into a family of avid book readers, Jan studied English Literature at Manchester University. She is a compulsive people-watcher and is enthralled by the minutiae of everyday life, utilising both these facets of her personality within her writing.

When not sitting at a desk with pen in hand, she loses herself in the garden, where she can be found with hands in the soil, or inhaling the scent of flowers. You may also catch her walking along country lanes, armed with a camera, or having fun with family and friends.

Reviews of Bentwood...

Bethany Rivers (poet, author and creative writing tutor),
author of ‘Fountain of Creativity: ways to nourish your writing.’


Jan skilfully weaves together the everyday details of the characters’ lives, bringing them vividly to life.
She creates a tapestry of stories from a variety of individual character voices you will fall in love with.
When you reach the end of the book, you will want to read these fascinating character portraits all over again.

English Reserve
Ian Alexander

Published: October 2025
Paperback: 167 pages
Price: £8.80
ISBN: 978-1-918172-02-7
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Available from
Amazon
English Reserve
by Ian Alexander

The volunteers are working happily in a small nature reserve in Middlesex. They mow the meadows, repair the boardwalk, dredge the pond, and keep the paths tidy. They chat amongst themselves and discuss how they could solve all the world’s problems... if only the reserve’s management and government more generally would listen and act rationally. It would be idyllic, if it wasn’t for the litter-picking.

Years before, the area had been shaped by noisily competing railway companies: used as a quarry, and as railwaymen’s gardens, abandoned, saved from being built over. It was a miracle it had survived, with nature flourishing amidst the urban jungle. Meanwhile, in a minor English public school, the boys endure a life of spotty food, compulsory team games, bullying, and homophobia. Some of them are marked for life.

Back in the reserve, families visit on sunny days while school groups come to hunt bugs and go pond-dipping. But some visitors hurry in and out without glancing at the wildlife. What can they be up to? As the volunteers speculate on what’s happening, one of them plays a practical joke, which goes horribly wrong. As the police arrive to solve the supposed murder, history catches up with the unwelcome visitors.

Ian Alexander is a retired systems engineer, amateur naturalist, and conservation volunteer. He enjoys seeing and photographing wildlife of many kinds, especially dragonflies and orchids. He has co-authored several books on systems engineering.

He is the author of a history book, The English Love Affair with Nature (2015) and contributed five chapters to West London Wildlife (2022).

He gives talks to natural history groups on the subject of that love affair, and on topics such as camouflage and life in an urban nature reserve.

He is married with one daughter.

https://www.obsessedbynature.com

Amazonia
Nick Gosman

Published: August 2025
Paperback: 244 pages
Price: £10.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-98-9
Available from
Amazon
Amazonia
by Nick Gosman

Taking the premise that urgent action to avert climate change and environmental destruction requires radical solutions, the story unfolds around an ancient and secretive company known as the Diadem Corporation. At its head, an unexpected climate champion emerges in the form of its celebrity CEO, Brigitte Fassbender, who, at a stroke, saves the Brazilian Amazon. In return for paying off the country’s crippling national debt, Fassbender secures a ninety nine year lease ending decades long destruction through deforestation and mining.

Unknown even to Fassbender at its head, her announcement to the world that the Amazon has been saved triggers the final stage of an ancient conspiracy hidden within the Diadem Corporation. Deep within the company’s fabric, a mysterious order known as the Fellowship of Dael meets to decide on the fate of humanity itself.

On pain of death, supplicants of the order have worked for successive generations to ensure the Fellowship’s centuries old plans come to fruition resulting in decedents of the Dael, a long-extinct race of beings who first visited Earth in antiquity, take what the order sees as their rightful place as rulers over the morally inferior human race. A closely-guarded secret amongst an influential elite within the Diadem Corporation, the Fellowship’s intentions remain obscure until the dénouement of the story.



Nick Gosman gained an insight into what it takes to survive in the wilderness during his formative years climbing and mountaineering in Scotland and Continental Europe.

Since his early years wondering the world’s empty spaces with family and friends, wild nature has come to hold a deep spiritual resonance with the author, which he attempts to bring to his story-telling.

Finding Clara
Graham Hitchcock

Published: May 2025
Hardback: 414 pages
Price: £14.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-79-8
Available from
Amazon

and
The Geat British Bookshop
Finding Clara
The Revenant, the Heretic and the Occultist
by Graham Hitchcock

Demoralized academic Tobias Jackson, encounters an enigmatic young woman on snowbound train in the Highlands of Scotland, in the winter of 2011. From that moment onwards, a sequence of unnerving experiences forces him to doubt his core beliefs.

Tobias is supported by Medieval History graduate and former lover Emma Andersson. Emma makes a shattering discovery as she tries to locate the woman on the train. In an attempt to find out the true identity of this woman and achieve some resolution, they embark upon a dangerous and frightening journey into the past of Clair Sinclair.

Travelling in the footsteps of Clair, the journey takes them from Caithness, to the Isle of Mull and Iona, where an unsolved Scottish mystery engulfs Emma. Continuing onto Cathar Country in the Languedoc France, as they encounter people who knew Clair, they try to piece together fragmented clues. Coming face to face with evidence of terrible tragedies, they accept that Clair Sinclair believed she had been here before, as someone called Clara, remorselessly leading them to an unknown endpoint.

Returning to Scotland, Emma begins to unravel a tale of love and faith in a time of medieval inquisition and a remarkable escape story that turns historical orthodoxy on its head. As lost manuscripts and documents, buried history, religious and historical controversies emerge amidst a cast of unforgettable characters, a revenant, a heretic and an occultist collide.

Can Emma Andersson write the story of Clair Sinclair?

White Wolf
Nick Gosman

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 281 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978-1-915972-76-7
Available from
The Great British Bookshop
and
Amazon
White Wolf
by Nick Gosman

In a story that pays homage to the latter-day frontier world of Jack London, WHITE WOLF recounts a lone woman’s struggle to survive in the arctic wastes of a forgotten land far from the world that most of us know or could imagine.

Here, in a purest space of bitter cold and uncompromising hardship, Migla is reborn. Forced to discover herself anew, her experience fosters a second catharsis and she becomes a different person.

Delving into her being to find the strength to survive, Migla comes to terms with her new life and falls in love with the animals and plants she encounters there. At times mystical and enchanting and at others deeply disturbing, WHITE WOLF is a treatise on the transcendence of the human spirit and the redeeming power of nature.

“All that is left of me is my robe and my spirit. Now I’m dying, I gave everything away. I don’t have anything to give you anymore. Only my robe and my spirit are in your hands. Now my tears come”

Wallace Black Elk



Nick Gosman gained an insight into what it takes to survive in the wilderness during his formative years climbing and mountaineering in Scotland and Continental Europe.

Since his early years wondering the world’s empty spaces with family and friends, wild nature has come to hold a deep spiritual resonance with the author, which he attempts to bring to his story-telling.

The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story

Michael McCarthy won the 2023 Creative Writing Award of the Association for The Study of Literature and the Environment, the body which represents teachers and scholars of environmental writing and eco-criticism.


The Man on the Mountain
A babyboomer love story
by Michael McCarthy


This is the account of an improbable and ultimately tragic love affair, between an arrogant and cynical drugs baron and an idealistic young policewoman. In fact, it was more than improbable, it was impossible. It could not have a happy ending. It was doomed before it began. Yet when in the end it happened, it was a true union of two hearts.

The remarkable love story of Gideon Horrocks and WPC Clare Sowerby is centred around a major drugs conspiracy, a multi-million-pound plot to flood all Europe with LSD. Set in a gritty and grimy location – the industrial Lancashire of the 1980s, in the early years of Thatcher’s Britain, with unemployment rapidly rising – it brings together two people each with great unhappiness in their pasts, who find, wholly unexpectedly, the possibility of a happy future together. Yet even as they do so, events are closing in on them, and an explosive climax is coming…

Told with remorseless pace, The Man On The Mountain combines two gripping and interlocking narratives – one about the fate of the most controversial of generations, the babyboomers, and the other about the power of love to reopen even the most tightly-closed of human hearts. And together they form a tragedy that is as unforgettable as it is extraordinary.

Published: May 2025
Paperback: 323 pages
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 9781915972729
Available from Amazon

Michael McCarthy has won numerous awards for his environmental journalism as the former Environment Correspondent of The Times and the longstanding Environment Editor of The Independent. His book The Moth SnowstormNature and Joy (2015) was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, Britain’s principal nature writing award, and also for the Richard Jefferies prize. His novel Fergus The Silent (2021) won the 2023 Creative Writing Prize of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, with the chairman of the judges describing it as “wonderful.” This is his second novel.