Ruth Downie's Blog, page 14

At last… Semper Fidelis in the UK!

Finally, the untold story of Hadrian’s visit to Britannia is released in print in the province! Read all about it here.

If your local bookshop doesn’t have a copy on the shelf, they should be able to order it. As should your local library.

To the people who have been asking where it is – you know who you are! – thank you for your patience. To anyone who’s thinking, “Shouldn’t that be ‘the previously untold…’?” – yes it should, but I’ve already had to ruin the flow of the sentence by putting ‘i...

Welcome…

…and thank you for visiting.

I’m the author of a series of mysteries featuring Roman Army medic and reluctant sleuth, Gaius Petreius Ruso.

His latest adventure, SEMPER FIDELIS is now available in ebook and print, and there’s also an audiobook, read by Simon Vance, tho’ I fear that may only be accessible in the US and Canada.

So, what’s it about?

Ruso, back with the 20th Legion, is doing his best to avoid all the hullaballoo surrounding the visit of the Emperor Hadrian and his unimpressed Empress,...

Fiction and Fakery

I was going to start this post with the Goebbels quote, “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.” Unfortunately it turns out that Goebbels probably never said it. According to this site, what he actually said was, “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it…” Of course he may not have said that either, since I’ve only picked it up from the Internet, but it suits my purposes.

This is all by way of introducing a marvellous article by Charlo...

What about a newsletter?

Thank you to Charlie, who’s just asked to be added to the newsletter email list if I have one. Up till now there hasn’t been one, largely for reasons of technical incompetence. But a pleasingly short and simple newsletter from a writer friend dropped into the inbox this morning, and if she can do it, so can I.

Unfortunately my email saying, “Yes! Welcome!” bounced back, which wasn’t a great start. Charlie, if you’re reading this, please could you get in touch via the contact page and we’ll try...

Prima Donna Downie

This weekend I’ve been chatting with the lovely Rob Cain from “Ancient Rome Refocused” via the miracle of Skype. Rob will be podcasting my ramblings at some point – if he can edit them into something sensible – but in the meantime something he said set me thinking. It was the very simple question:

Where do you write?

The answer to that was once, “The bedroom. When the children have gone to bed and Husband is downstairs watching TV, I turn on the computer, get the corkboard of out from under the...

Welcome…

…and thank you for visiting.

I’m the author of a series of mysteries featuring Roman Army medic and reluctant sleuth, Gaius Petreius Ruso.

His latest adventure, SEMPER FIDELIS, was published in January in the USA and Canada , and there’s also an audiobook, read by Simon Vance. It’s available as an ebook in the UK and although hardbacks are not in the shops yet, I’m told imports are available.

So, what’s it about?

Ruso, back with the 20th Legion, is doing his best to avoid all the hullaballoo surr...

A sad loss

We woke this morning to the news that James Gandolfini had died. It felt like losing an old friend of the family.

We came late to The Sopranos in our house. We missed the start of the first episode and it was a while before we realised that behind the violence and the overweight men swearing at each other, there lay a sharp script complemented by marvellous acting.

As the stories unfolded, I couldn’t help wondering whether the Mafia is a spiritual descendent of ancient Roman ancestors. Roman so...

SEMPER FIDELIS ebook…

…is at last available in the UK, hooray! Apologies for the long wait, but it should now be downloadable from all good ebook “shops”.

Hardback print editions are not in the High Street yet but imports are available. I’m sorry about any confusion caused by the different release dates in different countries, but at least this book will only have one title. That may not be exciting for anyone else, but it cheers me no end.

CONVOY – Caroline Davies tells stories from the Second World War

I have to admit that poetry makes me nervous. I approach it with caution, afraid of revealing yet again that I just haven’t got what it takes to appreciate this sort of thing. But when Caroline Davies passed some of her poems about the Malta convoys around our writers’ group, even I could see that here was something special. I’m delighted that Cinnamon Press thought the same thing, and they’ve now published the whole collection.

CONVOY weaves together the stories of the men who risked despera...

Coming soon… CONVOY

This weekend I’ll be talking to Caroline Davis, author of CONVOY, a new collection of poems telling the stories of the men who fought to get supplies through to Malta during the Second World War, and of their families back home.

With luck we’ll have a couple of the poems right here on the blog.