News

I’m delighted to announce that the long-delayed prequel, The Rage of Fortune, based on the adventures of Matthew’s eponymous grandfather, has been published as an e-book by Endeavour Press! You can get hold of it here (link is to the UK Amazon site, but it’s on others too),

Endeavour will also be bringing out the next book (i.e. the seventh) in the chronological series, The Devil Upon the Wave, set against the backdrop of the Dutch attack on the Medway in June 1667; this should be out in time for the 350th anniversary.

And talking of the Medway anniversary…I’ll be speaking about the Dutch wars and the Quinton Journals at Gillingham Library on 8 June, as part of the Medway Festival. I’ll then be speaking at an international conference in Amsterdam on 23-24 June – full details here. I’ll also be speaking at the Hitchin Festival on 29 July (more details as soon as they’re confirmed).

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I’m really excited to be embarking on new fiction project, involving three linked stories with naval and maritime settings, all set within the Tudor period! These will be published by new imprint Endeavour Ink, the first traditional publishing venture by my current e-book publisher, Endeavour Press. More details here.

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My next non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, will be published by Seaforth in August 2017. This will do exactly what it says on the tin, i.e. examining the role of those two monarchs in the development of the navy, but it will do a lot more as well, looking at the whole Stuart dynasty’s relationship with the sea – up to and including the Jacobite era, which has a surprising amount of relatively little known naval history. Kings of the Sea will tie together a number of the themes that I’ve been investigating for over thirty years, as well as producing a large amount of new evidence which fundamentally revises perceptions of Charles II in particular.

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My other current non-fiction project is as the co-editor of a book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, along with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. I’m contributing the chapter on the seventeenth century Royal Navy.

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Finally, a quick plug for the first book by my ‘significant other’ Wendy Berliner, the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed! Titled Great Minds and How to Grow Them: High Performance Learning, this will be out in August.