Fiction

  • Snow on the Danube: a wartime thriller and romance

    On a bitter winter morning, a young man stands on Budapest’s Chain Bridge, staring down at the Danube as snow melts into the river. He has lost everything. What stops him jumping is not hope, but the weight of an untold story. Snow on the Danube is a powerful, haunting novel that moves between modern day Budapest and the city’s darkest hours during the Second World War. When Béla Pongrácz inherits his great uncle’s manuscript, he discovers the hidden life of Count Zoltán Pongrácz, the last of a ruined Hungarian aristocratic family. Hypochondriac, musical and obsessively nostalgic, Zoltán grows up amid the splendour of Andrássy Avenue, the zoo, the circus and the Danube’s glittering banks. History soon tears that world apart. As fascism takes hold and Budapest becomes a city of disguises, cellars and shattered bridges, Zoltán is forced into acts of courage he never believed himself capable of, risking his life to save his adored sister Anna. His story is one of love, betrayal, survival and moral compromise. As Béla reads, past and present collide. What began as a legacy of words becomes a lifeline. Lyrical, darkly comic and deeply moving, Snow on the Danube is a novel about memory, inheritance and how stories can save us when we are closest to the edge.

  • the Time Devil cover

    The Time Devil

    A fantastic time-travelling story in the format of a ‘teaching script’, which helps teenage readers improve their ability to skim, scan, summarise, and ask questions.

  • Who Do You Love

    By turns comic, tragic and deeply romantic, Who Do You Love is a stirring contemporary novel that explores the big, enduring questions of passion, loss, death and grief, while never losing sight of the small, telling moments that make up a life. It is a fast-paced love story rooted firmly in the present day, but it is also a reflective and emotionally searching exploration of what it means to be alive now, to love intensely, to make mistakes, and to keep going in the aftermath of loss. Moving between humour and sorrow, intimacy and distance, the novel captures the volatility of modern relationships and the fragile, defiant human desire for connection, meaning and renewal.

  • The Last Day Of Term

    Told within a single day, The Last Day of Term is a novel which interweaves the gritty realities of teenage life in an inner-city school with a touching and comic story of a man in crisis.