Thursday 22 October 2015

Five books I recommend - and an astonishing offer if you buy them this week

It's sometimes easy to forget that the point of this blog is to sell my books. So this week, I'm unashamedly selling books – though only one of them is mine.

Until next Wednesday (28 October) Accent are offering five of their historical novels for the bargain price of 99p (99c in the USA) for all five. One of them is Burke in the Land of Silver. So, effectively, you can buy Burke in the Land of Silver for 99p and get four other books thrown in for nothing. It's stunningly good value. Is there a catch? No, there isn't – except that all five books are by authors who have several novels out with Accent and if you enjoy them you may well want to read more.

What's included in the bundle besides the first of the James Burke series?

Best of the lot (and I hope I'm not offending any of the others) is Just One Damned Thing After Another. I keep on enthusing about this book. I read it because it's published by Accent, but I'm so glad that I did. Jodi Taylor knows a lot about history and sticks it into her novel, but it's hardly most people's idea of historical fiction. It's a time travelling romp that owes more to Doctor Who than any other literary source. The quintessentially English heroine hops from disaster to disaster as she travels through time, pausing to recuperate with regular cups of tea. The history is well-researched and interesting, the action is dynamic and gripping, but most of all it is very, very funny. I'm working my way through the whole series. It's brilliant and the bundle is worth buying for Jodi Taylor's book alone.


Jane Jackson writes historical romance. Unlike some romance writers, I know that Jane researches her books carefully. Crosscurrents is set around the Industrial Revolution and, while it has its share of ebony curls, broad shoulders and muscular thighs, it also has an astonishing amount of details about hot air-engines and their advantages, or otherwise, over steam power. Ms Jackson has a fine eye for clothing and furniture and fills her story with details of both, painting a deeply textured word picture of Cornwall two centuries ago. Her books are very popular and Crosscurrents is a good introduction to her world.


I haven't read James Green's Another Small Kingdom, but I reviewed a later book in his series set in the early years of the USA on behalf of the Historical Novel Society and I was impressed. His work is definitely worth a read.



George Rees is new to me. I've only had the chance to read the opening pages of An Eye of Death and that has certainly encouraged me to read more. It's a murder mystery set around the world of Elizabethan theatre.



So that's four books free when you buy Burke in the Land of Silver for 99p. Or, if you prefer to look at the other way round, Burke in the Land of Silver free when you buy four books for 99p.

Click on myBook.to/HistoricalSet to be taken to the appropriate Amazon page. But do be quick: the offer expires next Wednesday. Once you've bought the books, they sit in your Amazon library like any other and you can read them whenever you want.

1 comment:

  1. The offer is over now, but bundle is still great value at £3.99.

    ReplyDelete