News

I’m delighted to announce that Endeavour Press has published The Devil Upon the Wave, the seventh book (chronologically) in the Journals of Matthew Quinton! Written to mark the 350th anniversaries of the Dutch attacks on the Medway and the assault on Landguard Fort, the story plunges Matthew into the woeful saga of ineptitude that led to one of the worst defeats in British history, as well as placing him in the impossible position of being aboard an enemy ship as it sails into battle against his own people… With ‘cameos’ by Charles II, Samuel Pepys and Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, The Devil Upon the Wave presents a dramatic take on some remarkable events. The long-delayed prequel, The Rage of Fortune, based on the adventures of Matthew’s eponymous grandfather, has also recently 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). Both books should be available soon on print-on-demand.

Breaking news – The Rage of Fortune is, indeed, now available in hard copy too on all English-language Amazon sites, and The Devil Upon the Wave should be available in the same format very, very soon!

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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, and can be pre-ordered here. I’ve received my first advance copy, and a big thank you to Seaforth, because it looks absolutely superb! 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 has just been published, and went immediately into the Amazon bestseller lists on the back of her recent Guardian article, which summarises the main arguments of the book.