I blogged last month about my pleasure in reading General Gordon's diary from Khartoum while I was researching my novel Pharaoh, and how I particularly relished his attention to detail - describing everything with an engineer's eye, and calculating quantities and distances as closely as possible. One great advantage of this was that I knew that I could rely on his sketch maps as a basis for the maps that my publisher Headline created for the novel, both of which are reproduced here along with a printed original from Gordon's diary
Read MoreOne of the great pleasures for me in researching my novel Pharaoh was acquiring an original copy of General Charles Gordon’s Journals, covering his final months as Governor-General in Khartoum in 1884-5 before the city was overrun by Mahdist forces and he was killed. I’d wanted to find out more about his archaeological and ethnographic interests, but I found myself utterly absorbed by his day-to-day management of the city and the problems he faced. Unlike his other published work of the period ...
Read MoreI’ve just returned from a canoeing expedition with my daughter in Algonquin Park, a huge expanse of more than 7,600 square kilometres of forest and lake in central Ontario first mapped by Royal Engineers surveyors in the 1820s and 1830s. At the time, the main interest was in finding a new route from the Ottawa River west to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, but as any modern canoeist will attest that was never going to be feasible – there are too many portages! Instead the region became a focus for logging, much of it to supply the British shipbuilding industry, until that was stemmed by the creation of the park in 1892 and the preservation of large tracts of wilderness that remain today, with abundant populations of bear, moose and other wildlife, and much of the park interior only being accessible by canoe and portage. My novel Pharaoh was very much in my mind throughout our trip, and the extraordinary fact that the Nile expedition of 1884 depended on Canadian voyageurs of aboriginal descent who had learned their skills on lakes and rivers very similar to those that my daughter and I were traversing ...
Read MoreI'm delighted to say that my UK publisher Headline have put up a free chapter sample from Pharaoh on their website, in advance of the UK paperback publication next month. The excerpt comes from a chapter about a third of the way through the novel. Earlier, Jack and Costas had made an astonishing discovery in the Mediterranean, searching for looted Egyptian antiquities on a 19th century wreck. What they find takes them up the Nile beyond Egypt to the deserts of the Sudan, to a place inundated by the waters of the Aswan Dam that provides clues not only to an ancient Pharaoh but also to a British officer whose mission in the 1880s becomes part of Jack's own quest. Read more to follow Jack and Costas on of the most incredible dives of their careers ...
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