GILLES OF BEC AND THE CAGE FULL OF BIRDS by T D OWEN

An historical novel and mystery set in 12th century Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

The Cage Full of Birds is story of real people who lived and struggled in The Anarchy of twelfth century England; a stirring tale of self-discovery, the triumph of hope over doubt and, ultimately, of good over evil.

REVIEWS

‘I have been devouring A Cage Full of Birds! I love it, truly! The characters are so well drawn,
and Gilles shines through like a Candide.’

‘Such detail, characters, description, pace… brilliantly done.’

‘What a dance you’ve done there, so good. You made the landscape and period integral
to the reading experience, not just the characters and plot.’

‘The descriptive passages are very lyrical and beautifully evocative of their local settings.’

‘Great suspense building and humour too. I have laughed out loud at many places.’

TIM OWEN is an historian, author, public speaker, teacher and battlefield tour guide with a flair for the dramatic.

I was born in Nottinghamshire in 1959. I studied medicine, then went into software development, where I have stayed ever since, watching one innovation after another promise to change everything. A good number did. Work took me abroad, including fourteen years in southern Italy, before I came home to England.

I have written stories since school, but for most of my life they had to wait their turn. With retirement in sight, they no longer do. What I write comes out of a working life spent building things meant to improve how we live. I tend to see the potential for good in what we create. I hope I’m right.

That hope sits at the heart of PS (Post Singularity). Celia Jones leaves Merthyr for a Cambridge AI lab, where she quietly builds a machine of her own and calls it Echo. Running from 2013 to 2036, it is my attempt at a Nineteen Eighty-Four for the age we are walking into.

Authored by Others is set in Oxford. Novelist Chloe Summers is fifty-two when her publisher starts opening doors for her: Geneva, Paris, a masquerade in Mayfair. Every choice is hers. By the time she sees how the arrangement works, the question is no longer who did it, but how much of it she chose. It is the first of a trilogy.

Both novels are out in hardback, paperback and on Kindle, alongside several short-story collections, among them Parallel Tracks and The Other Versions of Us. Find them all at ajblackwell.co.uk

Steve Sheppard was born and grew up in Surrey before moving to Buckinghamshire and then to Oxfordshire, where he spent a quarter of a century living in an idiosyncratic village that was the affectionate inspiration for his fourth book, Lazytown. He now lives in Hampshire. He spent forty years starting to write books but not finishing them, until belatedly realising that the key is not to give up. The other thing he has since learned is that he should have become a celebrity before writing a book, as this would have made selling it much easier.

False Connections, Steve’s fifth book, was published in June and is the first to be written as a straight thriller and not primarily as a comedy although, don’t worry, there’s still quite a lot of humour in it. He hopes it will be the first of a series featuring feisty, funny but flawed ex-MI5 agent, Mel Milano. He also has three spy thrillers with laughs to his name, all published by Claret Press: A Very Important Teapot (2019), set in Australia, Bored to Death in the Baltics (2021), not set in Australia, and Poor Table Manners (2024), which takes place in Cape Town. These feature an initially fairly hapless hero, Dawson, and a considerably less hapless heroine, Lucy, together with varied supporting casts, most of whom are not who they claim to be. Steve’s fourth book (as mentioned above) is an out-and-out comedy-murder-mystery, Lazytown (2025).

Pamela Roberts is an award-winning creative producer, historian, author and founder of Black Oxford Untold Stories, a cultural platform dedicated to uncovering, documenting and bringing to wider public attention the histories and contributions of Black scholars at the University of Oxford.

Pamela is also the author of Black Oxford – The Untold Stories of oxford University’s Black Scholars and The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual: James Arthur Harley.

She is an alumnus of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Historical Society.

I am a freelance artist and self-publisher of small illustrated books. My books range from experimental mark-marking to short, dark, humorous tales. More recently I have focused on themes of nature and horror… still with an amusing slant! My latest book, created in collaboration with writer Claire Blakemore, introduces you to the otherworldly.

Gabriel is an up-and-coming fantasy author from Oxford. His debut novel ‘The Worth of Scars’ is an epic flintlock adventure with a twist, fusing extremely dark and thought-provoking themes with the classic fantasy quest.