All of the below titles are under £1.50 for the month of June. Click the images to get your copies now!
All of the below titles are 99c for the month of June. Click on the images to get your copies now.
2. The Moomin books, by Tove Jansson
If we are doing this chronologically, and my main man Robin the accountant in Happy is the One would insist we do, I have to start with the Moomin books. My mum used to read to me when I was little and I just adored the characters and world that Tove Jansson created. I remember thinking I’d love to come up with fictional worlds of my own one day. Among the Moomin characters, my favourite has to be Moominpappa, with his urge to write (he has a memoir pen!), his struggles to find his place and his brilliant little sayings like ‘Bless my tail!’
2. Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka
I studied Kafka a little when I did German at university and just loved his way of conveying the struggles of being human through weird and unforgettable stories. In Happy is the One, Astrid is a Kafka expert and shares one of Kafka’s most striking short stories with Robin, that of the ‘fasting artist’, a man exhibited in a circus cage on his own volition and starving himself for weeks at a time. This story is barely ten pages long, yet it left me with so much to think about.
3. May We Be Forgiven, by A M Homes
It was on re-reading this funny, sad and ultimately life-affirming American novel in 2016, that I thought, ‘Gosh, if books can be like this, I want a stab at writing one.’ It begins with a violent tragedy and follows a man out of his depth as he takes on the care of his niece and nephew, flounders at work and in love and grapples with demons from his past and family members from his present. It’s witty, unconventional and vast in scope, with so much to say about modern America. I had the pleasure of meeting Homes at a book signing and told her she’d inspired me to write my first novel. She made me promise I’d finish it. I often thought of that promise as I limped towards the last lines of my debut, Everything Happens for a Reason.
4. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider
It was Twain’s belief that he would die when Halley’s Comet was in the sky that inspired the premise of Happy is the One. Twain had been born with the comet in 1835 and predicted he would go out with it when it was back in 1910. He was right. In Happy is the One, my main character Robin is born when the comet returns again in 1986. Newspapers at the time re-tell Twain’s beliefs about the comet and his spookily accurate prediction. Robin’s mother cuts out these articles and sticks them in Robin’s baby album. When I knew I was going to be working with Twain’s comet prophecy, I read his autobiography. It’s not something you can read cover to cover, given his editors were left with a mass (and a mess) of notes to put in some kind of order. But as always with Twain, there are great lines and observations and some extremely touching stories from a family life marked by many tragedies. He relays his daughter Susy’s cynicism at a young age when she lists all the hardships in life and then says simply, ‘What is it all for?’ This too provided a central theme for Robin’s story and his own quest for meaning. What is it all for?
5. The Return of Halley’s Comet, by Patrick Moore and John Mason
Once I knew Halley’s Comet had got its claws into me, I wanted to read up about its previous appearances in our skies. I can’t remember seeing it when I was seven and it was passing Earth in 1986, and I’m not surprised because as Patrick Moore and John Mason note in this brilliant book, the conditions then for viewing the comet from the Northern Hemisphere were poor. I picked this book up – published in 1984, but still available – thinking it would give me a fact or two about the time of Robin’s birth and a taste of the fervour around the comet’s first return since the dawn of the space age. What it provided was centuries of stories around the comet: observations of it by the Chinese and the Greeks thousands of years ago; myths about the comet being the star of Bethlehem; the comet’s appearance in the Bayeux Tapestry; its condemnation as an ‘agent of the devil’ by a 15th-century pope. Moore and Mason also share the colourful life story of Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, who was the first to identify that a comet observed every seventy-five years or so throughout history was in fact ‘one and the same’. All of this history and Halley’s life fed into my character of Robin, himself an avid observer of the night sky.
Happy Is the One, by Katie Allen, is published by Orenda Books.
When people ask me why I’ve set most of my books in America, I explain that I’ve always been influenced more by American culture. When the inevitable follow-up question – Why? – is levelled at me, I point them to my childhood. London in the 1980s was a bleak place in many ways, and the way Britain was portrayed on TV reflected this. Think about Thatcher-era Coronation Street or Eastenders. This was a country telling itself its own stories, of people struggling to get by in rundown houses, with never enough to go around. It was in tune with the council estate where I grew up.
Then contrast that with the TV shows coming out of the US at the time. The opening to the A-Team had palm trees, androids, fast cars. Knight Rider could’ve been set on another planet! Dynasty, Dallas – these weren’t people struggling to get by, these were masters of the universe. This was a world of colour and power and excitement, and as a kid, I lapped it up.
As I grew older, books took centre stage. One of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read was The Firm by John Grisham. While Tom Cruise’s salary as a junior lawyer wasn’t the most important element of the plot(!), I remember it leaving me wide-eyed, a sum that seemed impossible to imagine. American movies had a similar impact – from the wide-open landscapes of films like Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves to the anti-hero patrolled urban jungles of Heat and Carlito’s Way, I was drawn to the dark stories and dark characters found in the best American fiction.
Here are five of my top influences as a writer:
1. The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy
This wasn’t the first Ellroy novel I read, and it’s certainly not his best known or widely acknowledged, but it’s undoubtedly the one that has had the biggest influence on my writing. The Big Nowhere introduced me to the idea of police as bad guys, killers as good guys and morality existing only in different shades of grey. The mix of real-life events, characters and places is intoxicating, grounding the book in a brutal realism that makes it all the more impactful. And most of all, it’s the moments where Ellroy thumbs his nose at the idea of crime as some kind of ‘lesser’ genre and drops a line or passage as heartfelt and affecting as anything you’ll read. I can recite the last lines from memory: ‘When the noise died, he was climbing into the foothills, Los Angeles just a neon smear in his rear-view mirror. He touched his future there on the seat: sawed-off, heroin, a hundred and fifty grand. It didn’t feel right, so he turned on the radio and found a hillbilly station. The music was too soft and too sad, like a lament for a time when it all came cheap.’
2. Heat
Michael Mann’s masterpiece is probably my most enduring single influence, which is somewhat surprising when I confess this one small detail: the first time I watched it, I hated it.
That’s because when it first came out, I was looking for a twisty thriller of the kind I was accustomed to – cops chasing an unknown villain, lots of surprises, a big ‘whodunnit’ reveal at the end. Heat wants nothing to do with that kind of story.
Rewatching it a few years later, my understanding had matured enough to realise that the power of this film lies not in the complexity of its plot but in the complexity of its characters. Despite being on opposite sides of the law, Pacino’s Hanna and De Niro’s McCauley slowly realise that they are two sides of the same coin, creating a grudging respect between the two. The diner scene where these two icons are face to face is the most famous, but it is the ending, again, that stays with me the most – De Niro’s quiet acceptance of his fate, Pacino’s thousand-yard-stare as he comes to terms with what he’s been forced to do. It only works because of the film’s depth of characterisation, and that’s a lesson I’ve tried to bring to all of my books.
3. The Wire
The Wire is the opposite of everything I loved about American TV as a kid (yes, all writers are hypocrites!), but this is an object lesson in storytelling. Characters rise and fall over the course of five series. Seemingly unbreakable bonds are made – and shattered. Honour among police is shown to be as illusory as among thieves. Time and again, The Wire rejects established storytelling tropes and easy plot arcs to instead create something so detailed and real, some fans didn’t believe the stars were actors.
In part, that’s because the story goes out of its way to ensure there are no heroes here. Any time the viewer is tempted to start rooting for a character, they let themselves down – and us, in the process. And the reverse is true; we begin to understand the motivations of even the worst villains, often shaped by such bleak life experiences that it’s impossible not to feel at least a degree of empathy. These are people made by the world they inhabit, and both are so richly drawn that the result is – improbably – Dickensian.
4. John Grisham
A confession: when I said The Firm was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read, what I neglected to mention was that I stole it from my sister and read it under the covers – I was still supposed to be reading The Famous Five.At the time, The Firm and then The Pelican Brief were the most tense and suspenseful things I’d ever laid eyes on – surpassing even Five Go Off to Mystery Moor. Grisham is a master at deploying Chandler’s old adage of showing the audience the bomb under the table, ratcheting up the tension with every paragraph with a pace that never lets up. Time and again, I’d feel sure there was no way out for the hero – only for Grisham to send them even higher up into the tree and throw bigger rocks at them. Creating such a potent atmosphere of dread is hard – sustaining it is even harder.
5. The Red Riding Quartet, by David PeacePeace wears his Ellroy influences on his sleeve in this series of novels spanning the late 70s and early 80s, but it’s not the similarity in style that makes me such a fan but the way that Peace somehow creates the same sense of claustrophobic and labyrinthine darkness in Yorkshire as Ellroy does in LA. Until I read these books, I’d come to believe that what Ellroy had created was unique, a combination of his mastery and a very specific place and time. But the Red Riding quartet recalibrated my tastes somewhat, reminding me that the UK can be just as engrossing and enticing a place for crime stories. The characters are as compelling as anything set in the US, the darkness as horrifying – and the redemption just as uplifting.
Rod Reynolds is the author of Shatter Creek, sequel to the bestselling Black Reed Bay, published by Orenda Books.
Firelight stories, stolen plots, Venice and vampires…
The inspiration for Dangerous
Essie Fox
It was never my intention to write a novel about Lord Byron. At the outset, my interest had been to try and find a way to create a vampire novel. But, where to start in a genre that’s been more-or-less sucked dry? How could I be original?
I began by researching the more recent Anne Rice novels, and then early literature, such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Edgar Allen Poe who, whilst not being explicit in his references to vampires, does delve deeply into themes of love enduring beyond death. Finally, I stumbled on a novella first published in 1819, which I had read some years before without being aware of the story’s origin.
The Vampyre, by John Polidori, features a charismatic but mysterious aristocrat by the name of Lord Ruthven. Ruthven frequents the London salons where he seduces young women before they’re wickedly discarded. He then travels abroad with a companion called Aubrey, who learns the truth of Ruthven’s nature when a lovely girl is attacked in Greece and left to die with a wound to her throat. After this, Ruthven is injured by some bandits on a road, and while he’s dying, he asks Aubrey to promise not to mention his name for a year and a day. Aubrey keeps this promise and then travels back to London where he is shocked to discover Ruthven very much alive, and also married to his sister … a sister Aubrey cannot save for by the time he arrives, she is dead, her fate having been to glut ‘the thirst of a Vampyre! ‘
It is no coincidence that a character called Ruthven first appeared three years before, in the pages of Glenarvon, a ‘fuck and publish’ novel by Lady Caroline Lamb, who wrote it as revenge, at the end of an affair with the infamous Lord Byron. Caro also coined the term ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know,‘ when describing her dark lord.
Indeed, this warning of danger proved to be true for Polidori who, at the age of just nineteen, had qualified as a doctor and was employed to join the poet on his European travels, after a series of scandals, debts, and marital woes led to Byron being voluntarily exiled. As Byron’s personal physician, Polidori was present at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Byron lived during the summer when Mount Tambora erupted, when the ashy atmosphere caused unusually wet weather, sometimes with days as dark as night.
During this time, Byron was visited by the poet Percy Shelley, along with Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Often forced to stay inside, the group amused themselves by reading from a fantasmagoria – a book of stories of ‘the dead’ translated into French from the original German. These eerie supernatural stories encouraged Byron to challenge his guests to produce some horror stories of their own, and as the fire hissed and crackled, and wine and opiates were sipped, Mary Shelley nursed the seed of her novel, Frankenstein, while Byron started to compose the story of vampire.
Mary’s idea went on to form a classic novel, but Byron soon grew bored and dismissed his attempt as being foolish and worthless. However, his discarded ‘fragment’ of prose was saved by Polidori, who nurtured literary ambitions and used that single scribbled page to inspire his own creation. The Vampyre came out three years later, by which time Polidori and Byron were estranged due to the young physician’s tendency to churlish tempers. Perhaps he also held a grudge because, much like Caro Lamb, Polidori’s novel was a work of revenge, with the vampyre of the title clearly based on the life and the character of Byron. However, any sense of pride that Polidori might have felt in the achievement of his work was destined to be short lived, for when his story was published, his name did not appear as the author of the work. It was credited to Byron, which the publishers knew would lead to greater sales than something penned by an unknown.
When Byron heard of the fraud he was enraged and asked his publisher to sue Polidori’s publisher. Polidori was dismayed to be accused of lying and plagiarising Byron’s work. No doubt it was this shame, along with other disappointments, that caused the troubled doctor to commit suicide at the age of twenty-five – never living long enough to see his name upon his book, and never knowing that the novel would endure and become a classic of the vampire genre.
Learning of this sorry tale, I was, all at once, inspired with the plot for my own novel. It would not be in the mould of the usual vampire novel, but a murder mystery set during Byron’s time in Venice. Taking the factual truths of The Vampyre’s publication, I then embellished those events into the fiction of my work. As Byron spent his time in Venice pursuing sexual pleasures, and as his poetry quite often alluded to his personal exploits, it was not such a leap to imagine a whispering campaign being spread among the Venetian upper classes, who hear of women Byron’s known being found dead with wounds to their throats and then suspect that The Vampyre is a brazen confession of the most audacious crimes.
By referencing certain sections from the pages The Vampyre, along with excerpts I have taken from Byron’s own poetry, and details of vampiric myth from ancient European sources, Dangerous is a crime novel embroidered heavily with themes of supernatural mystery. But it is also – I hope – a book that spirits into life the characters of the two men forever destined to be linked by their connection with the scandal and the lies that first surrounded Polidori’s horror novel.
Dangerous, by Essie Fox, is published on 24th April 2025, by Orenda Books.
Johana: Bonjour! I’m Johana Gustawsson, I am a French writer living in Sweden after more a decade spent in London, where my three sons were born. Son is the first instalment of our new Kari Voss thriller series, where Dr Kari Voss, a social psychologist, gets entangled into the horrific death of two teenagers who used to be her missing son’s best friends.
Thomas: Hei, hei. I’m Thomas Enger, I’m originally from a small town called Jessheim, but for the bigger (and maybe better) part of my life I’ve been living in Oslo. Having worked as a journalist for many years, I made my debut as an author back in 2010 with my Henning Juul series. Hooff, that makes me feel old.
T: I’ve always enjoyed teamwork in general a lot. To create something with another person is so much more fun than just doing it by yourself. It doesn’t mean that it’s half the work, of course, but what I find really enjoyable is just to throw ideas back and forth with someone as brilliant as Johana. Whenever we find ourselves backed into a corner, it’s easier to get out of the predicament as well, whatever it is, when you’re two.
J: Yes, and it’s the stimulation that I love the most. It’s always such an amazing and gratifying feeling to get the creative wheel running so fast that ideas pop every minute! Two brains are always better than one.
J: Funnily enough, we do it all together: plot, talk about characters, editing. We just split off the research as I love that process to bits and Thomas is not fond of it. It’s almost hard for me to stop researching and start writing! So, I was responsible for most of the science linked to body language and memory, and created notes that Thomas could study. I know, It’s totally geeky!
T: What I can add is that Johana was the primary writer on the chapters involving Kari, precisely because she had done most of the research, whereas I took more of the lead on some of the other characters. Having said that, we would always edit each other – add stuff, take away stuff – so in some of ‘my’ chapters there is a lot of Johana’s writing as well, and vice versa.
T: We write differently in our mother tongues; the structure of the sentences can be completely different at times. It’s possible that we sort of grew into a certain way of writing as well, adapting to each other in terms of syntax and grammar. Or maybe we just got very lucky.
J: We never really thought about it consciously, I think, but maybe we secretly just hoped for the best! As Thomas touched upon, we can easily have a dozen versions of the same chapter, sending it back and forth between us, so I guess our voices somehow ended up as one.
T: I prefer the actual writing the most. Dialogue, in particular. That’s where and how we really get to know the characters, hearing how they talk and seeing how they interact with other people.
J: I like it all but, but, but, I fear the worst when I have handed a chapter to Thomas, and he comes back with a long, over-elaborative sentence. I know then that the ‘but…’ is coming, and that I’ll have to rewrite extensively!
J: Kari Voss is a social psychologist expert on body language and memory who is grieving her missing son. She is very close to her father Hans-Christian, former Chief of the Oslo police, and to chief constable Ramona Norum with whom she has been working many criminal cases. Kari is hard-working, stubborn, and bloody brilliant.
T: Ramona, I would say, is a modern-day life policewoman in the sense that she juggles the every-day challenges of being a mother of two sets of twins with her partner Linnea, as well as heading up the high-profile investigation of the brutal double murder. Ramona was, actually, in part, based on my sister Hege, who lives in Trondheim with her partner Anita and their five children. Hege is not a policewoman, though, but a brilliant doctor.
J: To be honest, as soon as we talk plot and solve problems, we are in our creative bubble – it really is a magic thing. Even when my sons interrupt our conversations, popping into my office to ask me this and that, and end up talking to Thomas too, we go back to our mystery solving very quickly. I guess we are on the same work and creative frequency!
T: I think Stephen King said it the best: ‘Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.’
J: Write every day. Plan for 15 minutes daily. Sick, tired, drunk, no excuse accepted. Then increase that time until your story takes over and you get addicted to spending time with your characters.
T: And – read. Read a lot. Read everywhere and all the time. If you find an author or a type of story that you love reading: Study it or study them. There are secrets to be found on every page.
Fact or Fiction? Ten Shocking Truths in The Cure
Eve Smith
You might assume that the cure for old age discovered by my protagonist Ruth is entirely fictional. While elements of the ReJuve injection are made up, most of the anti-ageing research in my book is inspired by scientific trials for therapies that have either happened, are currently in development, or on the market now.
And those aren’t the only events based on fact. Read on for some disconcerting truths in The Cure…
1. ‘Modern Day Vampires Source Black Market Blood To Stay Young’
This news article in The Cure was inspired by a real news story about a biotech startup in California that sold teenage blood plasma to elderly clients for thousands of dollars, claiming it would make them younger.
This claim was based on some grim research experiments that joined old and young rats together, so their blood circulation was shared. Incredibly, the old rats became younger. There’s no evidence that the human blood plasma venture worked, but a study published this year suggests there may be more to ‘young blood’ infusions than we thought…
2. A Nobel Prize-winning scientist had Ruth’s Hitler nightmare.
In The Cure, Ruth has a nightmare about a rejuvenated Hitler praising her for her discovery.
A scientist called Jennifer Doudna famously reported having a similar nightmare. She had developed a groundbreaking gene-editing methodology, and claimed the nightmare was motivated by her fears about the abuse of her discovery, in particular eugenics.
3. One company is already selling a version of my fictional rejuvenation therapy.
For just over a million dollars, you can purchase a procedure called ‘The Terminator’ (yes, really): a series of gene therapies that target critical ageing-related parts of your body. It’s not licensed, and it’s never been tested, but the first person will be trialling it this year.
4. ‘Is Erik Grundleger Unstoppable? The ‘Super’ scientist now wants to bring people back from the dead’
This news article in my book also has its basis in fact.
Cryopreservation is where deceased bodies are preserved with a sort of human antifreeze and stored at very low temperatures in tanks. And that’s where they stay until someone figures out how to revive them, and whatever condition they died of can be cured. Cryonics pioneers started operating decades ago in the USA, but a Berlin facility recently opened its doors, so now you can be frozen in Europe, too.
5. GigaCities are on the horizon
In my novel, the population growth resulting from extended lifespan has driven the emergence of ‘gigacities’: vast urban areas containing over one hundred million people. While this hasn’t happened yet, there has been a rise in megacities, which have over ten million residents. There are already thirty-five (including Tokyo, Lagos and Shanghai), with an additional fourteen projected by 2050.
6. The genetic disease that killed Ruth’s daughter is real.
In The Cure, Ruth stumbles across a cure for ageing, while researching the cruel disease that killed her young daughter, Lettie. Tragically, the condition I based this on exists.
Progeria is a rare terminal disease that afflicts children, prematurely ageing their bodies at eight to ten times the normal rate. Most die in their teens, often of heart disease, or strokes. There is no cure.
7. Fifty-two countries imposed new death sentences in 2023.
In my thriller, illegal ‘age traitors’ are sent to an expiration facility to be executed. The procedure I describe is exactly what prisoners on death row are subjected to, who are killed by lethal injection.
Amnesty International recorded 1,153 executions in 2023, marking the highest number of executions in almost a decade.
8. The Parcel Poisoner who targets the homeless in my book was based on a serial killer called the Teacup Poisoner.
Graham Young poisoned his victims using a cocktail of homemade poisons, including a tasteless, odourless heavy metal called thallium. A disturbed man with a troubled youth, he had a fascination with Hitler, serial killers, and the occult.
9. The stats about biodiversity loss in the book are already true.
A report from WWF’s Living Planet Index estimates global wildlife populations declined by 73 percent between 1970 and 2020.
They attribute this decline predominantly to human-driven habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Which makes you wonder, what will happen when the human population reaches 10 billion, which the UN predicts will occur by 2058? And that’s before we factor in the impacts of a cure for ageing.
10. The first genetically manipulated babies have been born.
The genetic modification of human babies is illegal in this country, and most nations have very strict protocols because of the dangers of unknown adverse effects. But in 2018, one Chinese scientist announced that he had edited the genes of twin baby girls as well as a third baby, before birth. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Eve Smith is the author of The Cure.
Cornish Folkore and Small Fires
Ronnie Turner
In my second novel Small Fires, I’ve paid homage to storytelling across all many mediums. I’ve tipped my hat to stories from Greek mythology, from the Bible, from legends across the world. But I have also been hugely inspired by Cornish folklore and legend, and I’ve used it to enrich the lore of my fictional island – Godforgotten – in this book. Here are five ways that I’ve woven the Duchy (now my home) into the novel.
The Legend of the Giant Bolster and Agnes
Legend says that a cruel Cornish giant fell in love with a beautiful woman called Agnes. He pursued her relentlessly, until one day she devised a clever plan to stop her pursuer. She asked him to fill a hollow in the cliff above Chapel Porth beach with his blood to prove his love for her and win her love in return. But what Bolster did not know was that there was a crack in the hollow and as the hours passed, his blood flowed out into the ocean until he eventually died and Agnes, by might of her mind, won her freedom.
A chapter entitled ‘A Women, Burning’ is entirely inspired by this wonderful legend. You might recognise Bolster and Agnes in my characters Silas and Gaia.
Did you know the village of St Agnes (aptly named) has an annual festival and parade to celebrate this classic Cornish story? It’s wonderful and I try to attend every year!
The Legend of the Giant of St Michael’s Mount
This legend stretches as far back as the sixth century, when a giant called Cormoran lived on St Michael’s Mount, and regularly terrorised the folk of Marazion, stealing their livestock. One day, a humble boy called Jack crept up the Mount in the night and vanquished the giant, freeing the Cornish folk from their foe. Henceforth, he was called Jack the Giant Slayer.
This legend inspired the chapter ‘Knocking in the Earth’, in which I pay homage to Cormoran and Jack and weave this legend into a frightening story told between sisters on the shore of Marazion, with the Mount watching them in the distance.
The Cornish Knockers
Otherwise known as Buca, the Cornish Knockers are malevolent spirits or ‘fairy folk’ who lived in the tin mines and knocked on supports to bring the ceilings down and cause harm to the miners. They have many names, and take many forms in different parts of the world, but they are prominent in Cornish folklore for being sinister and mischievous.
I bring the knockers into the chapter ‘Knocking in the Earth’ to give you a glimpse of my two Cornish sisters, Lily and Della, their heritage and the darkness of their relationship.
The Celtic Goddess, Aine
Aine, also known as Áine or Anu, is a prominent figure in Celtic mythology as the goddess of love, fertility, and sovereignty. She is revered for her beauty, power and grace.
I wove this figure into the folklore of my fictional island in the chapter ‘Aine’s Well’, exploring what it means to be a mother, and to love and be loved – a strand to give some light and redemption to what is otherwise a very dark tale.
Kennel Vale
Moving away from folklore and legend to a very true historical event at Kennell Vale, a beautiful woodland with a dark past as a gunpowder mill. In 1838, five mills exploded in succession, killing one man and seriously injuring another. Ghosts are rumoured to roam Kennell Vale and many sightings have been recorded.
This location features in a chapter called ‘Soul Factory’, and, once again, is a backdrop for my Cornish sisters, Lily and Della, and their strange childhood.
Small Fires, by Ronnie Turner, is out today.
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Olivier Norek, whose historical novel The Winter Warriors will be published by Open Borders Press in September 2025, has had his crime novel Between Two Worlds named a Crime Book of the Year for The Times and The Sunday Times. The article calls Between Two Worlds “an exceptional novel”. For the full listing, see the article here: The Ten Best Crime Books of 2024.
On and off the beaten track…
1. Public swimming pools. You can find a public pool in every town around the country and every neighbourhood in the Capital, Reykjavík. The pools are heated and most of them have a wonderful spa area. It is truly magical to enjoy the warmth of an outdoor hot tub on a dark, cold winter night.
2. Harbours. Breathing in the fresh air and listening to the seagulls on the rugged Icelandic coast is just the best, and the sea seems to stretch endlessly into the distance. One of my favourites is Stykkishólmur Harbour, a beautiful port located on the Breiðafjörður Fjord, on the north coast of the Snaefellsnes peninsula in western Iceland.
3. Dimmuborgir (Dark cities/forts). Close to Mývatn in the North of Iceland, these are dramatically shaped lava fields where you can let your imagination loose amongst the caves and strange rock formations. I like it best when the weather is foggy or even rainy – it’s possible that you will see elves going about their day, but you must believe they are there. Pssst… they are there!
4. Húsavík. The oldest settlement in Iceland, Húsavík is a beautiful seaside town in the North East of Iceland, with great whale watching, delicious food and postcard-perfect scenery. I always recommend visiting Geosea, a geothermal sea bath with the best view out to the ocean.
There are many, many more wild, extraordinary places to visit in Iceland, particularly if you want to get away from the more visited spots. Message me on social media and I’ll give you some great tips!
Katrín Júlíusdóttir’s award-winning debut mystery, Dead Sweet, translated by Quentin Bates, is out in paperback on 7th December 2024.
