The English Priest

Dive into a tale that resonates deeply with the human experience. Explore the essence of humanity, the push and pull between our innate drive for goodness and the shadows of greed and power that marked the eras of the 16th to 20th-century colonization. This narrative doesn’t just recount history: it challenges us to reflect on our collective legacy and responsibility.

The Devil Walks in Daylight

Trying to forget the trauma of the Great War, Dietrich Praeter hides in the small, sleepy town of Kaifeck. Here, he tries to escape his haunting past, a place where his ghosts will leave him alone and he may finally find the peace and happiness he so desperately seeks. This is not to be. On a cold spring day in the Bavarian countryside town of Kaifeck, in the year of 1922, a few concerned residents--among which, Dietrich now counts himself too--go to check on their neighbors. What they find is a grisly, bloody massacre that continues to haunt the region. In the midst of hiding from his own demons, Dietrich realizes that everyone lives haunted lives, and perhaps the devil's greatest trick is hiding in plain sight.

The Corisco Conspiracy

The Corisco Conspiracy is the story of the Gunpowder Plot (the “conspiracy” of the title) as related, in crystal-clear prose, by William Shakespeare. It has long been suspected that the Shakespeares of Stratford-upon-Avon were crypto-Catholics. In this tell-all memoir, William, the first son of John and Mary Shakespeare, not only authenticates that suspicion, but also reveals significant events that happened in the Catholic underground of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

The most noteworthy of those events is the first meeting of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. It took place in Corisco, an island in present-day Equatorial Guinea which figures prominently in Shakespeare’s narrative. That was in November 1585 – twenty years before the plotters’ historic gunfight with security officers in Staffordshire.

Corisco was not Shakespeare’s only link to Africa. Some of his fellow “Jesuit messengers” were Afro-Europeans. He himself wrote only one of the plays for which he is famous. The rest were supplied to his acting troupe by a different spy: a Portuguese-African princess, who was instructed to write in them encoded messages for Roman Catholic theatre-goers. The Bard married twice. His second wife, the hitherto unidentified Dark Lady of the Sonnets, was a Muslim from the Kingdom of Malabo. So, he embraced Mohammedanism. His confidants, a London couple of Malian descent, were also Islamic members of the Church of Rome.

Many more Catholic rebels were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot than have thus far been listed in history books. Shakespeare does justice to them all in his account.

The Chaplin River Letters

In this gripping account, M. L. Jordan unveils the raw truths of the Civil War era. Beyond polished tales, dive into a world filled with desire, mystery, and chaos. Personal letters shed light on passionate love, deep betrayals, and unwavering faith. Experience America’s pivotal moment through the eyes of those on the battlegrounds and in whispered secrets. This isn't just history: it’s the heart and soul of a nation at war.

The Brave Ones

Rampant social and racial discrimination in the American Southwest during the 1940s offered little opportunity for a community of Yaqui miners from Sonora, Mexico.

The choice was clear: labor in the dangerous copper mines like previous generations and dream of someday making it big on the baseball diamond.

One group of men and women, however, had the courage to challenge the status quo and forge a new way of life.

The Brandy Mud

The year is 1840 and the perilous trade of whaling threatens to dash both fortune and sanity against the rocks for seasoned schooner Captain Stanley Knowles. Professionally adrift and beset by passionate entanglements, Stanley charts a course through hazardous waters, seeking to salvage his affairs while clinging to personal morals amidst mounting turmoil.

When ship and shore alike promise danger, every decision carries gut-wrenching risk. Stanley’s path requires outmanoeuvring lethal storms, hostile pirates, political schemes and amorous pitfalls alike with equal dexterity. One false move could reduce all – his principles, his mind, and his crew’s very lives – to flotsam in the winds of fate.

This steamy and exciting historical saga captures the adventures of a desperate captain warring within while struggling to steer crew and lovers toward a better life. Yet time and chance wait for no one. On the waves or in the sheets, one thing is certain: explore forbidden treasures at your own peril, lest the rising tide swallow you whole.

The Allies

This book lay almost half a century at the bottom of an old computer before it was published. At the time, it was considered politically ‘inappropriate’ because it was too ‘anti-Russian.’ It was written in America by two political émigrés, refugees from the communist part of the world, who knew Russia as it really is and always has been, even during World War II, when it pretended to be a faithful ally of the United States.

American pilots, crew members of a B 29 bomber, are hit by anti-aircraft fire during a reconnaissance flight over Japan. They make an emergency landing in USSR territory. It would seem that they are safe on the lands of an ally, but the reality turned out to be frighteningly different.

Although this book is historical fiction and its characters are invented, they are woven into real historical events related to the Manhattan Project infiltrated from within by Soviet spies. During Gorbachev’s ‘thaw,’ Stalin was forgotten, and Russia was to be ‘an example and model of democracy’ from then on. Even then, this book was supposed to be a warning; now it is allmost a wake-up call. Today’s Russia, waging a criminal, aggressive war against Ukraine, Russia of Vladimir Putin, with its troll farms, armed green men, murdering disobedient citizens in labor camps, poses an even greater threat to the entire free world.

The Abandoned Woman

Anita stared intently at Kofi unconsciously, trying to conceal her affection for him, yet she couldn’t.

As he stretched his hands and reached out to her, it was obvious that her inviting and prodding eyes were enough for Kofi.

She kissed and moaned under her weakened emotions, kissed him passionately, and sunk into his arms like a defeated wrestler.

All she thought to be true was a dream; all she saw was a mirage. Life had not been fateful to her.

She has been rejected and left to cater for her kid alone. She is exposed to the naked realities of the world and surely unending suffering.

Who is to be blamed for her upbringing? What about her unexpected end?

Tepatasi: Le Au'alumā

Christianity took root in the Pacific, nowhere more so than in Samoa. As World War I raged in Europe, the Great Influenza pandemic landed in Samoa in the winter of 1918. Facing tragic losses in their adopted village, a group of outsiders stayed behind to help. Living on the fringes of society, these women were unexpectedly thrust into the epicenter of the world’s most virulent pandemic. They found purpose as healers among strangers when it was needed most.

Tears in the Danube

William Jurin, a Jewish shop owner in Austria, finds his life turned upside down when Hitler and the Nazis seize control of the country in 1938. Married to a Christian woman, Jurim finds himself in a precarious position, fearing for his safety and the well-being of his family. In a desperate attempt to protect his loved ones and his livelihood, he works tirelessly to transfer his business and apartment to his wife’s name, hoping to keep them within the family.

As the Nazi terror spreads, Jurim faces numerous dangers and obstacles in his quest to secure safe passage to America. The book, based on a poignant letter Jurim wrote to his brother, who was sponsoring his immigration, and to his sister in Poland while traveling by ship to the United States, offers a vivid and heart-wrenching account of the harrowing experiences endured by Austrian Jews under the Nazi regime.

Swan's War

After Swan Samson’s oldest brother, Isaac, is murdered, Swan, a twenty-year-old Georgian, goes to war to find his brother’s killer and exact the revenge required by his notions of duty and honor. Swan’s War is the story of Swan’s internal struggle, in which the suffering of war and the slavery of revenge transform him completely. Swan easily convinces his two younger brothers to go to war with him. However, his twin brother, Jacob, is not as easily swayed. Jacob is in love with a slave girl and has no interest in fighting for the Confederacy. He also disdains Swan’s judgments about duty and honor.

Nevertheless, Swan persuades his twin brother to join the war and search for Isaac’s murderer by appealing to Jacob’s close relationship with their slain brother. Jacob will search for Isaac’s killer, while Swan seeks glory and revenge to repair his sullied reputation, which was compromised when he accidentally killed his best friend at the age of thirteen. During the war, Swan watches his younger brothers die, loses his fiancée, suffers grievous wounds, endures a year in a POW camp, and pursues, fights, and kills the man he thought had murdered his brother – only to find out that the real killer is someone he had known his whole life.

While Swan’s War is set during the Civil War and written by a historian, it is not really about that conflict. Rather, it is a character-driven story of the protagonist’s war within himself. The story includes strong female and enslaved characters, as well as family disputes. The protagonist and several of the main characters are based on the author’s ancestors.

Song and Symphony

The year is 1900 and life was about to change in a big way for Jaro Bauer. He and his father leave their small Bohemian village for the coal mines of western Canada in the search for a better life. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean and riding a train across the great plains of Canada, they find mining work in the Rocky Mountains.

Jaro is just 12 years old when his father dies in a tragic mining accident and is soon placed in an orphanage in Calgary. His only friend was a violin his grandfather had given him. He knew his country’s folk music but little else until Annie Broder took the young Jaro Bauer into her care at the Calgary Music Conservatory. Annie Broder recognized Jaro’s exceptional musical ability.

After several years at the Conservatory, the first examination in Canada by a musical examiner from London came along. The prize: a two-year scholarship to study music at London’s Royal Academy of Music. Song and Symphony follows Jaro Bauer’s development as a classical musician and his adventures with friends Oskar Baarova and Maria Landon.