Best-value books: The Broken Kingdom, £1.99
The prices of my 20-odd published books fluctuate and sometimes I am not quite sure why. Often my publisher tells me that they are going to drop the price of a novel to, say, £1.99, for a week or a month, as a special offer, sometimes the price-drop comes as a complete surprise to me (and I think is due to Amazon acting independently according to one of its arcane algorithms). But, this time, I have cut the price of this self-published novel myself. So this week’s bargain is . . . The Broken Kingdom for £1.99.
This is the first novel in a new series called Wormkind Chronicles. The Broken Kingdom is about the rise to power of an extraordinary young Dumnonian warrior called Arthur. It has all the usual Arthurian ingredients – Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Camelot, Excalibur, the Round Table and so on – but also a few extras which make the story low fantasy rather than historical fiction. The main difference to Arthurian histfic is the presence of dragons. Nimue (aka The Soothsayer) has awoken a powerful dragon called Cythraul from its slumbers in the frozen North and this Worm, and its offspring, the Wormkind, threaten the whole of mankind with extinction. The second difference is that this Arthurian story is set in a post-Roman Britain that is threatened by global warming. The polar ice caps are melting, the seas are rising and thousands of Saxons are being driven from their homeland by flooding and are emigrating to Britain.
I haven’t leant too heavily on the modern parallels with climate change and immigration – this is a gripping adventure novel not a sermon – but the comparisons are striking. The real Anglo-Saxon influx in the 4th/5th century may have been driven my pressure on land in north Germany and the Jutland Peninsula caused by flooding, occasioned by warmer average global temperatures over many decades.
So that’s it. This is today’s bargain book: The Broken Kingdom (Wormkind Chronicles 1) is just £1.99 for the eBook (which contains all five previously published digital episodes) and the paperback is also now cheaper at £8.99. I’m trying to get an audio book happening but no news yet on that front. In the meantime, enjoy!
P.S. If you are not interested in King Arthur, my Viking novel The Last Berserker (Fire Born 1) is also discounted to £1.99. Blood of the Bear (Fire Born 5) is out in October but can be pre-ordered here.
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