With the proof for Shadowknight in my sweaty palm and its publication so close It’s perhaps time to tell you a little about some of the themes within it and why it was written.

Firstly, and above all else, it is an adventure story. It is aimed at teenagers true, but also those who can still taste how fresh the world was when twenty was the oldest you could imagine being!

It is about a search for a resolution to loss and grief. It explores the themes of friendship, duty and revenge. Most of all it is meant to take the reader to a place inside them where wonder still exists.

It’s about horses, a species I have always seen as the height of evolutionary beauty...compared to them we are ugly, slow, and weak. We are ungrateful, violent, bald apes, who would not have conquered the world in the first place without the horse. This lack of gratitude has helped to make them one of the most abused species on our planet. You are, sadly, never far from an equine being abused or dying in agony.

There are few species that, when you meet their gaze, you truly feel that there is a sentient emotional being staring back at you. Horses are one, at least for me.

I’m truly lucky in having some wonderful friends...and some of the best of them have four legs and allow on their back...tasting for a short while...what it is to fly.