Tag: The Road to Newgate

Who doesn’t love a bargain?

Published on by Kate Braithwaite1 Comment

For the first time since it came out in September 2016, Charlatan is on sale as an ebook for only $0.99 or 99p or equivalent across all platforms and countries! You can grab it now by clicking here: mybook.to/charlatan

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“A dark, tale of mystery, sorcery, and a woman’s desperate pursuit to charm the most powerful man in seventeenth-century France. A poisoning scandal at the court of King Louis XIV threatens even Athénaïs, his glamorous mistress. She seems unaware of the accusations made against her, but how far has she really gone to keep the love of the King?”

 

Having spent so much of the past year thinking about The Road to Newgate, (especially my characters Anne, Nat, William, Henry and, of course, Titus Oates) it feels weird to put Charlatan front and centre again and read through the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads to make some social media adverts like this one:

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It’s my first book. The product of a long and steep learning curve and one I’m still on. I do love the cover, although I’m not sure I’ll ever read the insides again!! But it’s a pleasure to sit here with a cup of tea and look at some pictures of the characters I spent so much time with – only to abandon them when the book was complete.

Here are a few pictures I don’t think I’ve shared before. They are from my copy of The Affair of the Poisons by Frances Mossiker – a book which fell apart during the making of Charlatan!

I’m hoping a few new readers of The Road to Newgate will grab this chance to take a trip to 17th century Paris this week. I’ll be watching Amazon like a hawk, that’s for sure!

Cover reveal!

Published on by Kate Braithwaite2 Comments

I’m so delighted to start sharing the cover for my new book, The Road to Newgate, which is being published by Crooked Cat books on July 16th!

rtnfrontcoverThe cover is particularly relevant to the book as the background image is part of Ogilby and Morgan’s Large Scale Map of the City as rebuilt by 1676.

The map is a) beautiful and b) available to inspect online in great detail at British History Online. I love it so much I bought a print of it and hung it on our dining room wall.

What was so useful about it as a writing resource is that I was able to zoom in on all the book locations and relate the places I was writing about to modern-day London, getting a real feel for the geography my characters inhabited. Now I can tell you how long it took Nat to get to work above Henry’s print shop in Little Britain from his and Anne’s small home in Love Lane, near Billings Gate. I also traced the route of the Pope-burning procession that so distresses Anne on this map – more of that later – and worked out just how long it would take her to walk to Tyburn to watch an execution.

But for now, here is Anne in Chapter Two, walking past “The Pillar where the fire began” that you can see in the section of the map below, before turning right along Thames Street:

On Fish Street Hill, more people than usual are gathered around the new monument to the Great Fire. They are pointing. An addition has been made to the Latin inscription on its northern side. I’ve read the stone panel many times. It describes the fire that ravaged this part of the city, day and night, in 1666. On the third day, it reads, the fatal fire died out. But a new line has been added, indicating the rising tide of concern felt all across London.

One man translates, calling others to hear how it says now that, “But Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched.” Around him, people grumble their agreement. On the east side there is another addition, this one in Latin and English. I join the people peering at it and read, “The City of London was burnt and consumed with fire by the treachery and malice of the papists in September in the year of Our Lord 1666.”

            “Those Catholic bastards,” one woman shouts. “They’re the ones that should burn!” 

I hurry home.

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