Happy New Year to you all. I hope that you had a lovely Christmas and New Year.

This is my first newsletter, going out linked to my newly built and launched website, and I find myself looking back on the past year and looking ahead to what is in store for 2025. 2024 was the year I came back to writing. As many of you will know, my beautiful daughter Harriett died at the end of 2021. Since then I fell off the face of the earth for a long while, retreating into the sanctuary of my family. My wife, Caroline, and my sons James, Ed and Will. Grief devastated each one of us in its uniquely personal way, and much of that time feels like a fog, now, the pain so raw and deep that words just cannot explain it. I remember that I could barely function; I came off all social media, I could not write, could not even summon the desire or muster the concentration to read. I stopped watching television, stopped listening to music. Looking back, I am just profoundly grateful to Caroline and my wonderful sons. They kept me going each and every day. Gave me a reason to rise each day and face the world and the pain. And during this time Caroline turned our home and garden into an animal sanctuary, bringing home sick lambs, goats, ducks, trying to nurse them back to health. Caroline has always been a deeply loving, kind and empathetic person, but this leap into turning our home into an animal hospital I see mostly as her own way of coping. As many of you may know, our beautiful Harriett was profoundly disabled and our lives revolved around caring for her. So now Caroline is still caring for something. Actually, many things. And to be honest, I’ve liked doing that with her.

At the end of 2023 - almost three years since I had finished writing The Hunger of the Gods - I felt that it was time to finish the third and final book of the Bloodsworn Saga. My publishers Orbit UK and US had been wonderful, putting zero pressure on me, and neither had my amazingly kind readers. But I felt both an urge and an obligation to get back to the world of the Bloodsworn. It wasn’t that I had ‘gotten over’ the pain of losing Harriett, or ‘moved on.’ There is no getting over or moving on from a tragedy like this. The world is different now, emptier, and will never be the same for me. I think what has happened is that I have learned to live with the pain, to function despite the pain. It is always there, as if I am floating in a sea of grief, but I have learned to look to the good in my life, of which there is still an immeasurable amount. My uniquely wonderful wife, my beautiful children, my fabulous grandchildren, my dear friends. And so I made a decision to try and get back to writing, and I sat down to begin writing the Fury of the Gods at the very end of 2023, although I didn’t really get properly stuck into writing until the first few months of 2024.

It was a nervous time for me. I worried that I would not be able to write after having a break of almost three years, or that I would be a different writer, changed by life’s cruel blows. But when I sat down to write the words just poured out of me. In many ways it was cathartic, and I had finished FURY by early April 2024. Then I had a short break and went with Caroline to my first book event since before COVID, invited to France and the Les Imaginales festival by my wonderful French publishers, Leha Editions. Caroline and I were both quite anxious. The thought of just being amongst people again was daunting, but my French publishers were so kind and welcoming, and meeting so many French readers was a lovely experience.

Once home the publishing process kicked in, so I settled down to the edit of Fury, then the copy-edit and finally the proof-read. Before I knew it publication day in October was almost upon us, and then it was a whirlwind of interviews, and a UK book-tour organised by the fantastic team at Orbit UK. I had events at Bath Waterstones, Leeds Waterstones, ComiCon in London, Piccadilly Waterstones and Brighton Waterstones. Each one of them was a wonderful experience. It was emotional and overwhelming, and wonderful to see how people have taken Orka and the Bloodsworn to heart. And to top it all off, I heard that Fury became a New York Times bestseller.