The Gallows Pole is a historical novel set in 18th century Yorkshire. It focuses on the true story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, a ragtag bunch of local men under the leadership of '“King” David Hartley who scrape a living together by “clipping” coins to melt down and produce new forgeries. The book is set on the cusp of industrialisation, in the dying days of an era when a charismatic man could hold effective dominion over a valley, in a relatively closed community maintaining a form of isolation from the rules and laws of the land. The exciseman William Deighton enters as an outsider, vowing to take down Hartley and his hugely successful enterprise. As the web closes in on the Coiners, in the background cotton mills are rising, turnpikes slicing their way through the countryside, and a way of life being lost to history.

The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).