From We Love This Book

OUR DEBT TO BYZANTIUM James Heneage on how ancient conflicts haven't changed all that much A soldier hacked to death on a Woolwich street raises all over again our fears of Islam. It is nothing new. At the end of the 14th century it seemed likely that the tide of Islam would wash all the way to the Atlantic. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid had just defeated the flower of Christian chivalry on the field of Nicopolis in Bulgaria, and had boasted that he’d water his horses at St. Peter’s in Rome. That’s when The Walls of Byzantium, the first book in the Mistra Chronicles, begins. Bayezid’s ferocity had shocked all who’d heard of it. After the battle, he’d lined up two thousand Christian knights and told his religious advisors to execute them. The knights had been slowly hacked to death by old men who could barely lift their swords. Constantinople was all that stood in his way, and at stake was the Renaissance, taking shape in the city states of Northern Italy. It seemed doomed to an Islamic future. But in fact it survived for a crucial 50 years because of the brilliance of Byzantine diplomacy. MORE >

LOVE AND OTHER STORIES Greek myths and Byronic heroes influenced Morgan McCarthy's novel Morgan McCarthy didn’t start with just one debut novel, she began with two. She started writing her first novel, which became The Other Half of Me, straight after studying English Literature at university, and after a few years began sending it out to agents. "When I was waiting for it to come back or just getting a bit fed up with it, I started The Outline of Love, and then wrote them side by side over a long period of time." She is philosophical about the years spent writing and re-writing while working and renovating houses with her partner: “I left uni in 2003, got my book deal in 2011 I think, so it took about seven years to do both of them... when I finished the first book and handed it in, I had pretty much finished novel two. It was a total mess but it was a finished novel to go back to. It was a case of: 'here's one I made earlier'!" The Outline of Love is a compelling story of a young woman, Persephone Triebold, living in the very remote Scottish Highlands with her father and memories of her mother. MORE >