We have completed three novels.  THE WICKED LORD BYRON (click to see a snopsis) is an attempt to reconstruct the mind and life of Byron whose work and personality are a defining moment in the history of modern consciousness.  It is more a work of magic realism than a historical novel: on his deathbed, the tragic romantic doomed body and the giggling radical dandy that is the spirit separate, and begin to look back on their legendary life.  I wanted to give a fuller sense of this unique being, the revolutionary Lord, than I have previously seen in fiction - a brave man, a generous man, often a cruel man, but most impressively a man who, because of the astonishing breadth of his point of view, could always see the funny side of our essentially tragic existence. For sample chapters click THE DEATH OF SHELLEY.

WAYLAND SMITH (click for synopsis) is very different: not a fantasy but a piece of hard science fiction about those fascinating creatures that were the Norse gods - the dark fearsome Odin and the rest.  Norse culture was peculiarly democratic and liberal for the time - both single and married women, for example, had equal rights before the law. The gods are actually a band of superior beings who have been shot down to Earth when their planet was destroyed by the vile Org.  The Org are the reason why our history seems so interfered-with: why Harold lost the Battle of Hastings by a whisker to the ruthless feudal enslaver William after the Org had arranged for Harold to lose most of his army fighting a Viking army first, by the simple expedient of keeping William in France for 2 months using contrary winds - and giving us a thousand years of a feudal class system: why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car took a wrong turning 30 minutes after Gavrilo Princep had tried to blow him up in the town square, and skidded to a stop right by the dejected Gavrilo who was trudging home dejected and couldn’t believe his luck and happened to have a pistol in his pocket and popped Franz and his wife and caused the Great War (and if you saw that in a movie  you wouldn’t believe it);  why Hitler didn’t get into art school with the results we know; why John Smith died suddenly and gave us Tony Blair...

Finally THE TRAGEDIANS OF THE CITY (click for synopsis) is an epic attempt to suggest the decline and fall of the “counterculture” of the sixties and seventies into the barren cynicism of the eighties.  The story moves between England and America and examines the fates of characters whose personal pitfalls foreshadow the doom of that era.  The central event is a love story, and the title comes from the opening setting, in the cynical theatre world of the eighties, that flashes back to an earlier and happier time.  The betrayals in the central man-woman relationship and the parallel descent of the woman’s idealistic outlaw brother into murder and self destruction are meant to mirror the counterculture’s loss of innocence.