This week I'm guest-editing 'The Afterword' for the National Post, one of Canada's national papers with a circulation of nearly a million. Here's my first post:

My most recent novel, Pharaoh, is really a novel within a novel, a modern-day archaeological adventure also set in the late 19th century during the doomed British attempt to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum. I’ve always been fascinated by British colonial history, party because of my own family background – in this case, an ancestor who was a Royal Engineers officer and chair of the ‘Gordon Relics Committee’, responsible for safeguarding Gordon’s collection of ethnographic and archaeological materials after his death. During my research I immersed myself in first-hand accounts and artefacts ...