FAQ’s

The discovery of Lindow Man in August 1984 was the main motivation. Experts speculated he may have been a druid priest sacrificed at the time of the Iceni revolt. He became a priest in my novel — key to the revolt and its fate. From there, I wanted to understand the world he might have belonged to, and that curiosity became the seed of the whole trilogy.

Roman Britain is a period that’s often reduced to a handful of dates and battles, but underneath that lies an extraordinary human story — a native culture fighting to survive against an empire determined to absorb it. Boudica and the Iceni revolt gave me a way to explore loyalty, loss, and resistance through characters who felt real to me, not just names in a textbook.

I’ve tried to stay as faithful as possible to what’s known from Roman sources — particularly the accounts of Tacitus and Cassius Dio — while filling the considerable gaps with informed imagination. Names, events, and the broader political situation are grounded in historical record; the inner lives of the characters, and figures like Arminus, are where the fiction takes over.

Iceni: The Year of Sacrifice took around seven years from first draft to publication — years of research, daily writing, and repeated editing and redrafting, fitted around the rest of life. It was published by The Book Guild on 28 January 2025.

Book Two, Iceni Rising, picks up the revolt at its most dangerous and decisive point, and has already been accepted for publication. Book Three, Boudica’s Fate, is in progress and will bring the story of Boudica and the druid priests to its conclusion. Beyond the trilogy, I’m already drafting a further story set in Roman Britain more than a century later.