News update: audio version of The Last Berserker
Do you want the good news . . . or the bad news? The good news is that the audio version on The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1) is being uploaded to various different online stores and the official publication date is June 22 – next Tuesday. The Audible book (via Amazon) will take a little longer, another week, I’m told. But the audio file of my action-packed Viking saga about the legendary berserkir will be on sale very soon. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, while the paperback version is still discounted to a very modest £2, Amazon has already completely sold out of copies and it may be some time before it is available again. The Kindle version is still up there – and only £1.99 – and The Works has copies of the paperback at a similar price. And there is always Waterstones and WH Smith, of course, and your local bookshop can order it for you – but Amazon, which has been, to be fair, brilliant at flogging my stuff, is cleaned out. I’ll tell you when they restock but behemoths don’t move all that fast.
Anyway . . . back to the audio book. The Last Berserker is voiced absolutely brilliantly by an actor called Ade Dimberline (below), and he has nailed the characters. His voice holds exactly the right kind of soft northern accent that, to my mind, gives Bjarki and Tor a true Viking flavour. He also seems to have fully grasped the essence of the novel. I’m really impressed – and hoping we can use him for the whole Fire Born series.
In other news, I have finished the first draft of The Saxon Wolf (Fire Born 2), which is with my editor, and we are looking at a publications date for late autumn, so I guess November. And I have started thinking about Book 3 – probably a “quest” novel, with my heroes heading east into the Slavic lands.
I have also been catching up with my much-neglected reading over the past week or so. I have just finished Conn Iggulden’s superb Protector, and I have written a brief review . . .
“Conn Iggulden breathes fresh life into a famous struggle of the distant past – in this case a divided, provincial 5th century Athens at war with the vast might of the Persian Empire. He tells the story of a proud city on the verge of total annihilation, and the courage of its quarrelsome citizens who must forge an alliance with the iron-willed Spartans, and attempt to fend off the foe by sea, at Salamis, and by land at Plataea. His crisp, simple-but-elegant writing tells a familiar but still deeply moving story.”
If you like Ancient Greece, or just great historical fiction, I thoroughly recommend Protector, and you can buy a copy, should you wish to, here.
That’s all for now. More news as I get it.
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