LANGUEDOC & PROVENCE SUN

David Crackanthorpe

David Crackanthorpe was born in Cumbria, educated at Oxford, and is author of five novels, including prize-winning Stolen Marches and a biography, Hubert Crackanthorpe & English Realism in the 1890’s. He is married to a grandaughter of the writer John Buchan and lives in southern France.

Stolen Marches

As a student in France during World War II, Steven Seagrave risked his life for the Resistance. When the war was over Steven set out to find someone he once rescued - with blackmail as his only weapon Steven begins to play a dangerous game.

"For a first novel this book was stunning. It's believable storyline transported the reader to occupied France in the war years as seen through the eyes and experiences of the hero himself. It depicted the conflicts of individuals and communities and described most evocatively the areas involved and the feelings experienced by its main characters. The easy narrative flowed beautifully keeping the reader interested until the end with the love affair subplot. A most moving, well written novel that I was sorry to have to finish."

Horsemen Ride By

Marseilles, 1975. Bernard Vipont is a successful lawyer, but beneath his bourgeois surface lurkdarker passions. His father having been killed by collaborators during the war, he has been waging a clandestine campaign of retribution ever since, reappropriating art treasures stolen from Jews. But when he discovers a stolen masterpiece in a monastery, he may have stumbled into a maze of deceit and betrayal that even his ingenuity cannot extricate him from. A maze that seems curiously linked to his other obsession - the sexual fixation that forces him to enact a bizarre ritual in Madame Gazhakian's high-class brothel.

This Time the Flames

Briony West has grown up in the shadow of her father - an impressive man whose past as a missionary in Rhodesia has always been a mystery to her. But one day she discovers the secret that has haunted him for years - whilst in Africa, he fathered a son by an African woman. Matthew is now a young man and, despite his missionary education and light skin, he and his mother are part of a population controlled by a European colonial society. Shocked by the conditions she imagines her half-brother to face, in 1939 Briony decides to travel to Africa with the hope of advancing him in the world. But her arrival coincides with political unrest and she soon finds that her hopes for reconciliation are hanging by a thread in the midst of a country torn apart by war.

The Ravenglass Line

May Ricardo is a vivacious widow of grand passions and expensive tastes. But the shipping line that once supported her lifestyle is now in decline, and one of her sons, Hugh, who runs it, can no longer afford to hide the truth. Her reckless spending has increased dramatically since she fell under the spell of a new lover - the sinister Hungarian chancer Charlie Seker -