After more than a year of sitting on this, here finally is the deal announcement for my next two books!
It’s a dream to be working with Head of Zeus and Bloomsbury US to bring you The Last Verse of the Harp Lord in April 2027. I am coming for your hearts. I hope you’re ready to yield them up…
Then in 2028 you get my Gwydion, a tale of the Mabinogi’s trickster-magician in his own charmed words, and as you have never heard it before.
I am so proud of these novels and think they feature some of my very best writing. They also led me to start learning Cymraeg and the Celtic harp. It’s been a journey of delight and discovery that is far from finished. I honestly cannot wait to share them with the world.
Here I am at Gladstones Library in Nov 2022, starting my research. I began drafting in Nov 2023, finished in Sep 2024 and revised until Jan 2025 when we set out to find Harp Lord a home. By the time it hits shelves next April, it will have been almost five years in the planning, writing and publishing. Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of Authors, I was able to fund an open residency at Cove Park, Scotland, which provided some much needed writing time while I embarked on Gwydion. If you missed it, here’s what I got up to there:
A sojourn in the Old North
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April 3, 2025
In March, I was lucky enough to do a two-week subsidised residency at the beautiful Cove Park (thank you Society of Authors for funding it). I can't express how vital the solitude and space was. Not least at the start of a new creative project, plus weathering the anxiety that comes from being out on submission with a book I’ve worked on for two years a…
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Read on for an unofficial blurb of The Last Verse of the Harp Lord:
Among the tribal courts of the Old North, kings fight over territory and inheritance, over women and insults. The bards celebrate their deeds in elegy and epic. Yet the bards do more than merely sing, for their dark speech is a subtle form of magical control with the secret power to topple kingdoms. And none is greater than the legendary Harp Lord, Taliesin, bard to King Uryen.
Raised in Uryen’s Rheged, Aneirin always expected to take up the sword, despite being tutored in music by his mother. But after a chance encounter with Taliesin, he instead finds himself competing for a place at the bardic school of Ynys Môn, where aspiring bards hope to unlock the mysteries of awen: divine inspiration and the source of their power. It isn’t long before whispers start to circulate – could Aneirin one day rival Taliesin himself?
But Aneirin will discover that the price of awen is greater than he could have imagined. Beneath Taliesin’s arrogant façade, the great Harp Lord is a man pursued, forced to shift from shape to shape to evade the wrath of the witch, Ceridwen, from whom he stole his power. What begins as a game between the two greatest bards of their age becomes something more, as Aneirin fights to free Taliesin from Ceridwen’s hold.
A witch is not their only foe. While the North squabbles, the Anglian kings of Deira and Bernicia plot a deadly conquest. Uniting the Britons falls to the bards. Aneirin and Taliesin’s journey to save their people and their love will take them across the Old North, through the courts of ambitious kings and scheming chieftains, even to the terrifying shores of Annwn, the Unworld.
But fame everlasting comes at a cost neither will understand until it is too late.
The Last Verse of the Harp Lord is set in the heart of the Celtic heroic age when the shadow of the Unworld lies heavy on Prydain. It is a place of trickster-magicians, shapeshifters and death-songs potent enough to revive the fallen. A world where bards are imbued with the gift of prophecy, and where giants – too big to pass the door of death – lie motionless, their bones mined for ore. This is Britain in the age of legends.
As I said in another post, the early medieval era - so shining, so elusive - is a gift to writers like me. I am always looking to find the intersection of myth and history and the post-Roman Britain of the fifth & sixth centuries is full of semi-historical figures, many of whom were later incorporated into the Arthurian canon. One of these was Taliesin’s powerful patron, Uryen, king of Rheged. Taliesin was also a historical figure and it is thanks to his praise poetry to Uryen that we have even a misty idea about the Old North and its complex tribal politics. Much of the archaeological evidence for Rheged is missing, but I am writing this post in Cumbria, Uryen’s heartland, and have done my best to return his realm to rugged glorious life.
Next time…in search of Rheged.
Rheged was a large land, wild and full of shadows. Clouds pressed their bellies against the ground which rose to meet them, and we had rain. I was born here, Mam said, among the heather and harsh slopes. Valleys older than mad Myrddin Wyllt.
Stay tuned for news of Harp Lord’s cover and those all-important pre-order links!
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