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Showing posts from April, 2018

#HistFicThursdays - Nero and Sporus by SP Somtow - Book Excerpt

 Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to once again be teaming up with  The Coffee Pot Book Club , this time to share an excerpt from  SP Somtow 's fantastic new book  Nero and Sporus ! First of all, let's meet the book... Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. Nero and Sporus  is available on #KindleUnlimited via  this  link . And here's an excerpt to whet your appetite: I suppose we were anxious to see who the surprise competitor would be, but no one was as surprise...

John o' Groats Book Festival

What a weekend it has been! The 1st John o' Groats Book Festival has been in the pipeline for a long time, and it certainly lived up to expectations. It started with a bang on Friday. A cartographer was launching her new set of Northern Scotland maps. Sadly, I was at work during this event but I've heard great things about it from people who were there. The cartographer's name is Val Fry and the publisher is Nicolson. The first event I could attend was on the Friday evening when the authors were introduced, including 8 fabulous local authors who each had a 10 minute slot. It was great to see one of the organisers, Ian Leith , start the evening by showing his books. The next author was Virginia Crow, published by Crowvus, who started her talk by showing the Day's Dying Glory book trailer which had people sitting on the edge of their seats. Virginia Crow, author of Day's Dying Glory It was super to hear so many local authors talk about their books, an...

"Living with Depression" Book Review

Living with Depression by Nick Weatherhogg Blurb from Goodreads : " It has been estimated that almost one in ten adults and teenagers in the United Kingdom are affected by some form of depressive illness. This is a ten-fold increase in the last seventy years. If this growth were to continue unchecked, then about 95 percent of the population would have depression by the year 2100. It is further believed that depression will be the number 1 health problem worldwide by the year 2030. And yet for every three sufferers, less than 5 is spent each year on research. At least a half of all sufferers never seek any form of medical or psychiatric intervention. The origin of depression can be situational or biochemical or a combination of many different factors. People do not choose to become depressed, but they do choose how they are going to deal with it and what they will do. A range of treatments are available as standard, ranging from medication to talking therapies, but vari...