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THE DAYS OF MIRACLES AND WONDERS was a very difficult book to get published, and was regarded with fear and loathing by about twenty odd British houses, flaunting their rags in a period of Great Shaking which saw several independent publishers bite the dust. My editor at Bloomsbury had been fired (in their jargon: “relocated to work at home”!!!) and other potential soft touches had gone to ground or had put up their own For Sale signs. Eventually rescue came from an unexpected source: Canadian editor of a Toronto poetry magazine, Descant, Karen Mulhallen, who had a personal imprint at the Canadian Somerville House. This tied in with a deal with Canongate Books in Edinburgh, and a US outlet through the Palestinian publisher of my previous book The Silencer, who was now based in Massachussetts. Thus I finally hit the small presses, with my largest volume to date…
From the cover:
From his tomb in Fontevraud, the Crusader King Richard the Lionheart rises to face the modern world at the brink of the West’s Gulf War against Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The book weaves a tangled web of East and West, of new crusades fought on prime time television, of medieval Caliphs springing to life, of madness and sanity in the “New World Order.” Tragedy, comedy and farce intermingle in a tale of ordinary and extraordinary people, as the “smart bombs” of post-modern technology rush towards their apocalyptic tryst with Baghdad, the stubborn dreamland of the Arabian Nights. A story as old as the Bible and the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, and as modern as tomorrow morning’s headlines…
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