Our journey begins in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with The Drop by Ferryhill’s Howard Linskey.  Gangland has always provided a rich thematic seam for British authors to mine, but few have done so with more panache than Linskey showed in this dazzling debut.  The Drop is a sordid and violent tale, told with great vigour by the most promising debutant I’ve read this year.

Leaving Northumberland and heading to Denmark, the finest Scandi offering of another year’s plethora was Jussi Adler-Olsen’s sublime Mercy.  Its parts are the stuff of well-worn cliché; a downtrodden detective working cold cases, a broken marriage and a pervasive Nordic miserablism.  But, through exceptional prose and the introduction of one of the most engaging and complex sidekick characters, Mercy towers above the ordinary.  Morck and assistant Assad will return in English in mid 2012; the wait has been killing me since January this year.

The award for most poignant book of the year must go to Steve Hamilton’s The Lock Artist, deserved winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.  With a mute protagonist who never says a single word, Hamilton tells a tale of love, exploitation and alienation, managing to weave such noble and evocative themes around a full-blooded thriller.

Staying with our cousins in the USA, Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher offered an all-too plausible account of a protracted abduction.  Jahn’s writing has strong overtones of Stephen King, capturing the crushing hopelessness and insularity of small towns in the American south, rounding off with a bullet-riddled finale.

From dusty American settlements to Gothic English country piles, in July my mind was blown by the effortless excellence of Erin Kelly’s The Sick Rose.  A brooding and brilliant character study in two parts (and two eras), it introduced us to Paul and Louisa, two people haunted by their own dark pasts.  Kelly’s eye for emotion is staggering; the scenes where she describes the youth of an awkward adolescent are more vivid than my memories of actually being one.

The opening segment of Tom Rob Smith’s Demidov trilogy struck a blow for crime fiction by finding itself long listed for the Booker Prize.  As the trilogy drew to a close in Agent 6, Smith examined the death throes of Communism through the prism of a very private tragedy.  Smith tells a ripping revenge yarn spanning three decades and half the world, and does so while taking a sledgehammer to the established orthodoxy surrounding the politics of the Cold War.

I suspected at the time that Simon Spurrier’s A Serpent Uncoiled would be the most original book of the year, and am unsurprised by the lack of serious competition for the title.  Twisting the hardboiled genre into a delusional distortion of itself, A Serpent Uncoiled is part crime, part magic realism, and wholly superb.  The story is labyrinthine, with a deliciously deranged cast of characters, but the strength of the book is Spurrier’s endlessly creative prose.  Barely three lines in, as the pigeons “choked in moronic bedragglement,” I was hooked.

For a statement on the geopolitical state of affairs, eschew the papers or the TV, and buy a copy of Alan Glynn’s Bloodland.  It flits across borders and social castes, casting a gimlet eye over a vacuous celebrity culture, democracy as oligarchy, and the systematic looting of Africa.  This is no mere essay though; Bloodland is a pulsating drama from start to finish.  I was fortunate enough to meet Glynn earlier this year; the proudest possession on my shelves is a copy of Bloodland, inscribed for my daughter, that in the future she might better understand the year of her birth.

RJ Ellory was, bafflingly, subject to endless rejections from publishers, writing 22 books before getting his foot in the door of the literary world.  Publishers told him there was no market for an English writer writing about America.  As I closed the final page of Saints of New York, I was caught between marvelling at Ellory’s brilliance and laughing at the publishing industry’s Decca-esque failure to identify genius.  Saints of New York is a tale of one NYPD detective’s redemption, fusing history, Mafia folklore, and philosophy, and driving the combination home with irresistible emotional force.

And finally, for me, 2011 has been the year of CJ Box.  His consistently high level of quality makes it hard to pick just one of his books for the top 10, but the sixth in the Pickett series, In Plain Sight, is a deserving representative.  A tale of a blood feud that tears apart the town of Saddlestring, In Plain Sight is the darkest of Box’s books, and represents the very best of his output; excellent characterisation, thematic complexity and an abundant love of his native Wyoming.

Overall, 2011 has been a fantastic year to be a Bookgeek… roll on 2012!

The city of Rome in AD 50 is a dangerous place. Treachery lurks on every corner, and a shadowy Republican movement, ‘the Liberators’, has spread its tentacles wide. It is feared that the heart of the latest plot lies in the ranks of the Praetorian Guard. Uncertain of whom he can trust, the Imperial Secretary Narcissus summons to Rome two courageous men guaranteed to be loyal to the grave: army veterans Prefect Cato and Centurion Macro.

Tasked with infiltrating the Guard, Cato and Macro face a daunting test to win the trust of their fellow soldiers. No sooner have they begun to unearth the details of the Liberators’ devious plan than disaster strikes: an old enemy who could identify them, with deadly consequences, makes an unexpected appearance. Now they face a race against time to save their own lives before they can unmask the mastermind behind the Liberators…

Read the extract (PDF)

Praetorian is published on the 10th November. Look out for a review here on Bookgeeks soon.

On his epic journey Josseran Sarrazini would have watched these same mountains day after day. It is strange – not certifiable, I hope, but maybe – that someone who never existed should be so real to me. But I rode with him through every step long before I came here, saw it all through his eyes; from the Imperial post houses of Cathay to the caravanserais of Persia. It is perhaps not surprising that I see his ghost everywhere.

And ghosts and ruins are mostly what remain now. Like Xanadu, made famous by Coleridge’s unfinished poem; this fantastical city was not an opium-inspired rapture, it was once a real city, Khubilai Khan’s summer capital, Shang-tu. Now it’s just a few stones behind a grassy mound.

The Silk Road itself was not just a single road, like the M-26; it was a complex spider web of routes that linked Europe with Asia, twisting through China and over India, Persia, Egypt, Somalia, and Arabia until it reached Southern Europe.

It created a ‘global marketplace’ for the first time in human history; it was also a super highway for the transmission of cultures, ideas and religious belief, Man’s first tentative steps towards going online.

Eight hundred years ago, to travel the Silk Road was to undertake one of the most extraordinary journeys imaginable. It was like you or I being sent, without any training, to Mars. For a westerner of the time, restricted in thought and beliefs by superstition and the Inquisition, it must have been quite literally a life-changing journey. Even those that made it back would have been changed irrevocably, exposed to philosophies and knowledge beyond anything they could have conceived.

The world was a really big place back then. Now we have jets instead of camels, and Imperial post riders have been replaced by mobile phones and Twitter.

One night we stay in a guest house in Turpan, officially the hottest place on earth. The owner does not offer me the use of his wife and daughters for the night, as was the custom eight centuries ago. Even if he had, I don’t think my wife would have appreciated it much. There is only so much you can do and call it research.

Later we take the bus to Xi’an, which is an unnerving experience, even today. China’s roads have the highest death toll anywhere in the world, the bus drivers here all play chicken with each other at night with their headlights on high beam. Our dodgem bus drive to hell pauses at dawn for a rest stop at an oasis town. I use the word ‘oasis’ loosely. It’s a truck stop with a barbecue pit selling parboiled goat.

But it was much rougher back in the thirteenth century. Instead of oncoming trucks the dangers were bandits and civil wars and black hurricanes; and Josseran had the same choice between eating semi-raw gristle or starving, same as I do, only not nearly as often.

A dust devil hisses along the side of the road; I see him smile through the swirling grit. “What’s wrong with you, brother?” he shouts. “I did this for eight months, and still had to return. There’s a Hilton waiting for you in Xi’an. What have you to complain about?”

Silk Road by Colin Falconer is out 1st October published by Corvus

How to describe Little, Big? On the surface, it’s a book about a man who goes to a strange old house in upstate New York to marry a girl named Alice Drinkwater. But if I say that the house has several sides, and one of those sides faces on to Faery, you get a bit more of a sense of the feel of it. However, what isn’t easily imagined is the sheer power to envelop that the book possesses. A bit like House of Leaves, but without the post-modern trickery, this is a ‘house novel’ in which the house folds out, origami-like, seemingly beyond the wall of the story, to encircle the reader. It’s also a novel about many of the things that fascinate me: the ur-stories that crop up in different mythologies around the world (there is a strand concerning the German ‘king who will rise again’, Barbarossa, a motif that we know better from the tale of Arthur); the notion of the Palace of Memory; the hermetic idea, suggested by the title too, of ‘as above so below’. It’s about how we can construct vast structures and edifices – stories, or imaginary palaces in which we can store our memories – that are utterly without physical manifestation yet are utterly real. I think what it is saying, on one level, is that fairies are as real as love, as real as memory. I love that idea.

More than anything, though, it’s an attempt, in a vast and sprawling novel filled with characters more real than almost any I have encountered, to encapsulate an entire philosophy of life. Not one I could possibly put into words – that isn’t really the point, anyway – but a true one nevertheless. You close Little, Big, after its incandescent and impossibly moving ending, and you feel that you understand something about the cosmos, about the true nature of fairies, about mythology, memory, love, punishment, the right relation of objects and thoughts, and what it is to be human.

And then you blink and it’s gone. But it’s all right. Because you can always read Little, Big again.

My book hell is easy. My book hell is sci-fi. Of any kind. I just can’t bear it.*

* Except, you know, The Stars My Destination.**

** And The Demolished Man.***

*** OK, let’s just say ‘sci-fi apart from Alfred Bester’.

Nick Lake is an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s Books. He received his degree in English from Oxford University.

His first novel, Blood Ninja, was inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. His second novel, Lord Oda’s Revenge, has just been published by Corvus. Nick lives with his wife in Oxfordshire.

An innovative and new monthly digital publication, STUDIO will be available for readers to buy, search inside, read, and save its digital content worldwide; and can be accessed on a variety of devices, including both PC and Mac desktop computers, iPads, iPhones and other Android tablets.

STUDIO will be launching on 12 August 2011 featuring an exclusive interview with its very first covergirl – Anne Hathaway. Initially aimed at the UK market, developments are planned to make it appealing to English speaking countries worldwide; and will be hosted and distributed by Zinio – the world’s largest digital newsstand.

STUDIO regular sections comprise:

• Hollywood Happenings – a light-hearted look at what is happening in Hollywood.
• First Look – a sneak peek into what films will be hitting our screens.
• Style Spy – front row on the red carpet at the latest premiere and award ceremony.
• Steal That Style – exclusive interviews with Hollywood’s top make-up artists to the stars.
• Plus exclusive interviews, reviews and articles on topical events within the film and entertainment industry.

Bookgeeks’ contingent of women reviewers will be providing the contents of the book review pages, focusing on books that have been or will be making it to the silver screen.

Find out more at www.studiomagonline.com and you can buy issue one here.

The first time I drive out to the prison I am afraid. Afraid of what it will mean to work so intimately with the men who fill our newspapers with broken bodies and turn our dreams into nightmares. The guard waves me through the prison gates and I drive past the lawns, the beds of roses; the public face of the prison.

It is only when I turn past a stand of blue gums that I see the prison itself. It is made of mesh, a giant aviary, three storeys suspended between metal poles. There is bedding hanging from the steel bars. Thin brown hands extend through the bars rattling spoons against the mesh.

A gate opens and a group of men in orange surge towards me through a tunnel of razor wire.

“Your guys from maximum,” says the education officer who has made this mad scheme possible. They are tattooed and hard-bodied, bigger and tougher than the denim-clad juveniles coming towards me from the opposite direction.

I follow them into the gym. There are weights at one end, basketball hoops at the other. I have been allocated a corner and the 15 men I will be working with cluster desks around me. Other men – 50 or more, all in orange – file in after me. They pick up weights, watch me, ask the men with me what we are doing; only drifting off when the wardens insist.

Where to start unravelling the threads that twinned these men with me?

Childhood seems like the time in their lives that we can manage together. Glimpses of the boys they once were emerge in anecdotes of casual deprivation. A beating with a belt; a fishing trip on a boat with a father briefly sober; angry mothers with blackened eyes and too many children; school attempted and failed. For one man, though, there was a blue-and-yellow bike for his ninth birthday.

It is hard not to touch an arm here, a hand. Touch is a language that comes easily to me, but how does one speak it in a men’s prison? A headache pulses, twisting and lumping the muscles on my scalp, knotting my shoulders. I do not have a way to integrate the humanity of these men, what we share, with what they did that brought them to this place.

We take a break halfway through the three hours. I need the loo but there are no facilities for women. An armed warder leads me to a bathroom. He searches it. There is nobody hiding, but the door does not lock so he stands guard outside. In that moment, silence falls in the gym.

The workshops settle into a rhythm. I go out every Friday, we talk, we work, we write. We read poetry together. “My Papa’s Waltz”, a clean-lined beauty by Theodore Roethke, is about fatherhood and fear and yearning. For these men, there is an umbilical connection of form and subject matter. For the first time most of the men read their poems about absent, or feared, or longed-for fathers.

Then a tattooed gangster stands up and reads aloud for the first time. I suggest that he sends his poem home. Some weeks later, he tells me, his ex-girlfriend brought his six-year-old son to visit.
“I held him,” he points to his chest. “I can feel him in my heart.”

I think of that little boy who has a poem from his father telling him how he wanted to be a father to him, even if he failed; telling him that he loved him even if he did not know how. It is more than many boys have. It was more than the 15 men I worked with had.

One dropped stitch caught, perhaps, in an unravelling social fabric.

At the end of the year I had piles of handwritten stories and poetry on my desk. The paper carries with it the unique smell of the prison: a dusty grey hopelessness of lives turned to ash. It turns the stomach, but working with these men has helped me understand why South Africa is so violent. It also taught me to find a connection between those we discard through fear, through revulsion at what they have done, the families they have shattered, the violence they perpetrate.

The only path open to many township boys is so hard, so brutal that it annihilates the young and vulnerable self, the “bud” self, if I can call it that, that desires community, family and love.
Rashied Wewers, the oldest man in the class, wrote this for me as a farewell note:

I am
A book with a damaged cover, but what is
Written between the lines could save a country
From a disaster.

Margie Orford is an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, author and Fulbright scholar. Born in London, she grew up in southern Africa. She was detained as a student activist during the State of Emergency in 1985 and wrote her finals in prison. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and three daughters. Her novel Daddy’s Girl will be published this month.

Still, I knew that if Mozart’s Last Aria, my new historical thriller, was to succeed, I’d have to write convincingly about the great composer’s music. About its structure. Its performance. And the intellect behind it.

In other words, I’d need to imagine myself into the world of true musicians and into the head of the genius who wrote the most stunning music anyone has ever created.

First, I learnt to play piano. This demonstrated that I’m not much good on the piano. But it gave me a way to see inside Wolfgang’s music, because the piano study made me think more deeply about musical theory than my experience as a rock guitarist. (Surely THAT doesn’t surprise anyone, but it was worth demonstrating anyhow.)

Then I turned to some great musicians, to quiz them about Mozart and the way they perform him.

My main guide in this was my dear friend Orit Wolf, a fabulous concert pianist who has taught at the Royal College of Music. (You can see her dressed up as Nannerl and hear her version of Mozart’s Fantasia in D on this video ). Orit’s best-known for her heartfelt interpretations of romantic composers. But her insights into Mozart were startling.

Our discussion of Wolfgang’s piano sonata in A-minor I remember in particular. It gave me the idea of building the entire novel around the mood and structure of that piece, so that the novel should seem somehow musical even when the characters aren’t making music.

Orit also introduced me to some of the techniques great musicians use when they prepare for a performance. For example, she told me that when she first looks at a piece for a performance she decides what colour the music makes her think of. Before each performance, she’ll visualize that colour and it will create a mood in her, and in turn that mood will be reflected in the music as she plays it. It isn’t just about hitting the right keys.

So I did the same thing. Before I wrote about Nannerl Mozart performing a piece of music, I listened to it for a long time. I’d identify a colour and a season brought to mind by the piece. Then I’d hold those in my head as I wrote.

I still have the colour-codings noted on the index cards I used to plot the book. It’s a technique I’m intending to use for future books, even if they aren’t about music. A writer needs to keep himself very close to the emotion of his narrator and it isn’t always easy to concentrate on, say, sadness for the extended period it takes to write a chapter.

So from now on, thanks to my experience with the music of Mozart, my novels will be colour-coded.

Many readers have enjoyed the large casts of the books, and some have made lists of the borrowed characters, tracking them down to their original authors or spots in history. I enjoy the game aspect of the books, too – though I tend to cast around for someone who’ll fit rather than stop the plot to allow for a guest star appearance. When I needed a particularly loathesome vampire for the job of Governor of the Tower of London in the Dracula administration, I had a choice of many pre-existing monsters and went with the Graf von Orlok, from the 1922 movie Nosferatu, as the sort of rat-faced human stick insect even Dracula might not be comfortable sharing a room with (the more so in that von Orlok is literally a shadow Dracula, created to stand in for the Count in an unauthorised adaptation of the novel). When I wanted a prostitute/Jack the Ripper victim to reminisce about a stuffy, hypocritical client, Henry Wilcox – from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End – fit the bill, and in fact the backstory Forster gives him dovetailed perfectly with the requirements of my own plot. I did feel the need to do a few simple jokes, like the one with Anne Rice’s posy vampire complaining that his shirt got ruined in a riot … but even that is worked into a strand about a new breed of fashionable vampire who’ve only been undead for five minutes but already own six velvet cloaks and a silk-lined coffin and generally act the goth part (which, in the Anno Dracula world, inspires Gilbert and Sullivan to make fun of the trend the way they satirise Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes in Patience). It all feeds back into the story, and the exploration of the imagined, alternate, satirical mirror-world.

Which means I’ve a bunch of off-cuts that didn’t get into the book because there was no place for them (some might yet worm their way into the forthcoming Johnny Alucard – but some will get left out again). So, here are elements of the Anno Dracula world you can take as canonical but, for one reason or another, haven’t made it into the books (yet).

• The Hound of the Baskervilles. In Anno Dracula, I establish that Sherlock Holmes is viewed as a dissident and has been clapped up in a concentration camp (Devil’s Dyke) in Sussex. What I didn’t have room to explain is that this means he and Dr Watson weren’t available to investigate the persecution of Sir Henry Baskerville on Dartmoor. Unimpeded, the dastardly missing black sheep of the family Rodger Baskerville (posing as Stapleton the butterfly collector) pulled off the trick with his luminous dyed dog and drove Sir Henry to his death on the moors, then came forth to claim Baskerville Hall, inherited the fortune and lived to a ripe old age surrounded by his family. However, his own heirs inherited his disposition, so at least he was finally poisoned in 1953 by great-grandchildren who injected puff adder venom into his breakfast egg.
• The Producers. In 1967, the New York production company of Bialystock and Bloom set out to mount a surefire loss-making Broadway disaster and stage The Count and I, a musical about Dracula’s marriage to Queen Victoria starring Jim Morrison and Dom DeLuise. It runs for twenty-eight years, two years longer than the sentence B&B receive when their accountancy practices come to light. The hit songs are ‘The Pain in Vein’, ‘Coffin With the Fringe on Top’ and ‘Spring-Time for Dracula’. A 1970 big-screen adaptation, directed by Michael Winner, with Anthony Newley and Barbra Streisand is an epochal loss-maker for Hollywood.
• In the 1940s, when actual vampires are comparatively rare in California, a new style of vampire movie catches on in Hollywood, often created by European filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock who have real experience with the undead in their homelands, showcasing living actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich, who compete to seem paler and more pointy-teethed in a line of vampire-style evening gowns with flared collars, shoulder-pads and slit skirts. In movies like I Wake Up Bleeding, Double Interment, The Big Bite and Dead Women Are Dangerous, living private eyes are ensnared by predatory females and wind up bled dry in the gutter. The first movie star to turn vampire was Greta Garbo, who emerged from retirement to star in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1947 and won her sixth Oscar as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate in 1967 before settling in to a long run as the matriarch on Dynasty.
• It is rumoured that the Beatles only progressed as a band after John and Paul drove a stake through Stuart Sutcliffe, their lone vampire member, to prevent him leeching off them forever. Their first hit record was a vampire-themed novelty track ‘I Want to Bite Your Hand’. The band broke up when John married Lady Misraki, the vampire from Anne Billson’s novel Suckers. Before that, they went on a spiritual pilgramage to the Temple of the 7 Golden Vampires in China and were rumoured to have drunk vampire blood during the recording of the Red Album. In 1974, Ringo produced Count Downe, a satirical vampire movie starring Harry Nilsson as the Son of Dracula, but it was suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain as a libel against a member of the British Royal Family and he was stripped of his O.B.E.
• In 2008, Will Smith stars in I Am Legend, the horrific story of seemingly the last vampire in a world overrun by living humans … persecuted every night by his former neighbouts and searching for his own kind amid the ruins left when civilisation has to rely on regular people to get by. All the reviews say the film isn’t as good as the Richard Matheson novel it’s based on, and note that none of the previewed endings are satisfactory.

Some of the challenge is just inert factual accuracy: when did Napoleon’s Army of the Ocean Coasts become the Grande Armee? When did the word ‘saboteur’ enter the language? Some of the challenge is what you might call historical logistics: I need Tom Roscarrock and Richard Jessel of the Comptrollerate-General to fit in three meetings with agents between the 23rd and the 25th of July; plenty of time, but how far can a man travel in a day’s riding from London, without over-tiring his horse? That means one of the meetings is going to have to happen somewhere like Aylesbury, but was Aylesbury big enough to have an inn in 1805, and if so what was the inn called? Oh, and the nice bit of evening atmosphere I’ve just written is going to have to become a bit of dawn atmosphere instead.

Some of the challenge, though, is about trying to weave a plot around historical chronology, and this gets a little trickier. Admiral Horatio Nelson’s chase of Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve across the Atlantic in the summer of 1805 is fixed: its dates are known, and if I try to move one of them but a convenient day, The Emperor’s Gold is not just fiction but fantasy. Whether or not the story is actually true, it must be possibly true, and that means that I’m not allowed to teleport even the few ships of Admiral Zacharie Allemand fifty miles across the sea. Every real historical incident that I build the plot around is a demonstration of the possible truth of The Emperor’s Gold, but it also pins my story down to a fixed timetable and fixed set of locations. Admiral Villeneuve really did get crucial information from a Danish ship that his fleet met by chance, and the appearance of that incident in this book is another reflection of its plausibility; but the meeting took place on August 14th and at no other time, and that’s just tied my timetable even more tightly.

Meanwhile, the movements of Tom Roscarrock and the other key actors in this Comptrollerate-General operation have their own unavoidable logic of time and place. The realities of time and place affect where he meets agents, and where a house gets burned, and where a man is killed. Roscarrock also needs time to discover, to learn, and to understand. The Admiralty Board very naturally meets to discuss Admiral Calder’s engagement in the Battle of Finisterre (given time for the news to have reached them, of course), but it’s unlikely that they’d bother to meet again the very next day for routine business like the approval of funds for the American inventor Fulton. Without Eurostar (there certainly wasn’t a Waterloo station back then), the journeys of Lady Virginia Strong into and out of Napoleon’s France are a much more troublesome chunk of time within the plot, and that affects when she needs rescuing from a vengeful mob in Bury St Edmunds and when she can appear, sultry and abandoned, at a radical soiree.

I’m also trying to interweave these strands in a balanced way: a character and a narrative needs to recur regularly in the pages and the reader’s mind, not feature in three hurried scenes and then disappear for half the book. These conflicting demands led to the occasional outburst of creative swearing, and to a complicated calendar with points that were irritatingly fixed and points that irritatingly kept having to move. Then I worked out that the Sunday which set such an effective atmosphere for Tom Roscarrock’s first arrival in London was in fact a Tuesday.

Now The Emperor’s Gold is coming onto Kindles and bookshelves, and readers are making their own analysis of the operations of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey in that desperate summer of 1805, when chance and weather and the deeds of a few extraordinary individuals were swinging the fate of Europe – and meanwhile I’m back in the archives. I’m exploring the operations and evolution of the Comptrollerate-General in the strange years after the English Civil War; they’re fascinating indeed, and will make a fascinating book. But Charles I was executed on the 30th of January 1649 and, however inconvenient for the Comptrollerate-General’s activities, it turns out that I can’t change that.

Robert Wilton has held a variety of posts in the British Ministry of Defence, cabinet Office and Foreign Office. He was Private Secretary to three Secretaries of State for Defence, and advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead-up to the country’s independence, and has now returned to Kosovo as a senior international official. He translates a little poetry, very occasionally rows a gig, and is a co-founder of the Ideas Partnership, which stimulates and supports projects in education, culture, and the environment. He now divides his time between Kosovo and Cornwall. He has degrees from Oxford and the School of Slavonic Studies, and writes on the history and culture of south-eastern Europe and the role of the international community there. The Emperor’s Gold, the first in the series of historical espionage thrillers based on the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, as is available now

As part of his current blog tour, Giles Kristian, author of the Raven Trilogy, shares his influences and inspirations in an exclusive article for Bookgeeks.

I have always been drawn to the past. Everywhere I go and in everything I do I am confronted with the past and with an almost overwhelming sense of history. I catch glimpses of it in a thatched roof. I smell it in the smoke of a wood fire. I hear it in the languid sigh of waves on the shore and I touch it when I lay a flat hand on a rock at the fjord’s edge. I get enormously frustrated that I cannot go deeper, that I will never experience the past as it truly was and can only interpret it from a great distance. This is why I love historical fiction. A good historical fiction novel is a time machine, or the closest thing to one.

The other thing I’ve always been drawn to is conflict. To make war is all wrapped up in what it is to be human and will always be. I’m fascinated by it, horrified by it, and utterly compelled by it. In historical terms, I’m intrigued by warriors and great leaders, men who inspired thousands to fight and die for their cause; men like Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Nelson, even Hitler to an extent. These men must have had such force of personality. I imagine you would have felt the charisma coming off them. These characters also make great subjects for historical fiction authors. Velerio Massimo Manfredi’s trilogy on Alexander the Great is superb. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read him since he changed his translator, which just shows how important that person is to your international success.

I loved David Anthony Durham’s Hannibal: Pride of Carthage. It’s a beast of a book but drew me in completely and I’ve always admired Hannibal Barca. Anyone who could unite disparate peoples and give Rome a good hiding must have been something special. Watch out for the fabulous Ben Kane’s Hannibal: Enemy of Rome, which will be out in June. Stephen Pressfield is another author who writes conflict brilliantly. He knows how warriors think. He has the knack of showing how, although the way in which wars are fought has changed beyond recognition, the mind of the fighting man has not. Perhaps somewhat predictably though, my favourite author is Bernard Cornwell (and not just because he was kind enough to read my first and say good things about it) because in my opinion he is a craftsman who has mastered his art. His stories flow effortlessly and he weaves in rich historical detail with the lightest of touches. His latest, The Fort, is not what you might call a typical Cornwell novel, but it is brilliant nonetheless. He makes the principal characters so human (in fact, most of them really lived) that you recognize them instantly. They are brave, selfish, impetuous, ambitious, stubborn, crafty – in other words they are flawed like all of us and as a reader you identify with them. There are no obvious ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys, just real people caught up in conflict. Plus, I admire Cornwell for having the bottle to ‘re-visit’ the American hero Paul Revere the way he does in this book. You’ll see what I mean when you read it.

When I began writing I would keep in mind my favourite novels and what I liked about them. I’m a sucker for the battles and the fights, so I fill my books with them. I enjoy writing fight scenes that make the reader wince. I want you to feel the blood slap your face. I want you smell it and taste it and feel the fear writhing like a serpent in your gut.

I read the The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell sixteen years ago. Along with the other two in the Arthur series it has lingered in my mind ever since. I hope one day that someone says the same about one of my books.