It's time to start getting ruthless for Christmas

Shameless gift ideas from a writer on the edge

I’ve decided to use BRG this Christmas season to reflect, to reveal, and to shamelessly plug my own back catalogue. I’ll also be chucking out some other offers and news of things coming up for me in 2025 (my god, that is not an easy year to type. Time is catching up with us, my friends).

This week, while mail order (yes, I have decided to go back to calling it mail order, the first decision in a realignment process that will inevitably end with me living in a bivouac about thirty miles into the woods)… while mail order still is able to get stuff to you before that magical day, to do a short series of newsletters about my books. One a day. Indulge me. Or just don’t open the email. You have absolute control over this.

I’ll begin at the beginning (not really; this first entry is my second book — my first was the highly enjoyable 3-Minute Tolkien, a paid-up-front writer gig I got in 2013 by answering a callout on Twitter — remember when that place was exciting and useful?).

For Those Who Come After was my first novel, and if you enjoy sprawling family sagas that take in the Bloomsbury Group, the Spanish Civil War and South African diamond mines then you’ll love it.

It was my attempt at the great, weighty, literary novel, the thing I had always felt destined to write, and it’s a book I remain very proud of. It started life as a draft of a short story, and after I found myself unable to figure out the answers to the problems of the novel I was working on for my Masters in 2010, the short story (called “The Setubal Ending”) came back nagging at me. How it went from a 7,000 word story of a successful businessman reflecting on his own resentments toward his fading alcoholic mother for favouring his brother who died fighting fascism in Spain in 1937, to the 100,000 word novel published in 2013 is an evolution now lost to time, but I do remember the writing of it (eight years all told) would have been excruciating had it not been bolstered by the energies, obsessions, and passions of youth.

One reviewer said it reminded them of Robertson Davies, who at the time I had never heard of, so although the book itself made no impact on the literary world (or any other world, for that matter) it did introduce me to the work of the Canadian giant, now one of my favourite writers.

This in turn also introduced me to the idea that writers can be unaware of each other and still plough the same fields. Those fields might be thematic, or may be stylistic, but somehow our atomic energies flicker around each other. A few years later, I was interviewing the writer Cynan Jones on stage at a festival in west Wales and I asked him about his stylistic and thematic relationship with Cormac McCarthy. He said this had come up before, but he had never read McCarthy.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed from the below picture of For Those Who Come After, a cover endorsement from the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey (forever now to be known as “Booker Prize-winning novelist Samantha Harvey). Sam was one of my tutors on my Masters, and was kind enough to give a quote for the book.

'For Those Who Come After is majestic in its voice, bracing in its ideas – a man's pained confession that is told with depth, urgency and poise.' –Samantha Harvey

And here’s the official blurb…

Deep in the savage chaos of the Spanish Civil War a poet searches for answers to what he calls his "conversation with God". Another poet searches simply for revenge. Decades later, a biographer in search of a key to unlocking an enigma, comes across a manuscript locked away in an old London mansion house, revealing a history of violence, duty and one man's struggle to find his place in time.

The story told by aged hermit billionaire Hal Buren, scratching out the testament of his life in the dim light of his childhood home, is dominated by the disappearance of his brother almost fifty years before. Buren spends his life trying to protect his domineering mother, Matilda, and his sister's wife, Bess, from the corrosive truth, a truth that ends up rotting Buren himself. As the story develops a question grows: what can we trust to learn from our history? A novel that spans the twentieth century and introduces a litany of unforgettable characters, For Those Who Come After is a study in myth-making, of familial bonds, and the destructive tides of enduring love.

The book is available in all the usual places, but if you do fancy it, may I recommend getting it direct from the publisher’s website.