In the autumn of 1910 the famous architect, Edwin Lutyens, receives a letter from Sir Julius Drewe for the commission of a castle on Dartmoor – Castle Drogo. The design for the castle focusses on both the past and the present and reflects Britain, which at that moment is in a state of flux. Lutyens’ daughter, Celia, becomes enamoured with the project dreaming of chivalry and heroism. The following year Lutyens and his family are invited to a stone laying ceremony at Castle Drogo. Celia meets Sir Julius’ children: Adrian, Christian and Basil. Adrian has an unbending sense of duty and honour and is seen as a hero by Celia when he rescues a farmer from a fire.
The novel moves to 1914, and the start of the Great War. Christian Drewe returns from Austria where he has been working as an artist. He has reservations about joining up, unconvinced that the war was either necessary or right. He meets a nurse, Rose Braithwaite, when he is stuck at a railway station by fog. They subsequently meet again when Rose invites Christian to a party she is having for her birthday. Despite them being of different classes, there is a mutual attraction and during the evening they kiss. However, Rose is engaged and a fight breaks out between Rose’s fiancé, who arrives much later, and Christian. Both Rose and Christian decide never to see each other again. Christian’s moral conflict about enlisting comes to a head when he is handed a white feather – the sign of a coward. Eighteen months later, during the war, Christian is injured and is treated by Rose at a hospital on the front line. Both realise their mistake of following their heads rather than their hearts. Christian is sent back to a rehabilitation hospital in England where Celia is now working.
Adrian, when on leave, visits Christian and again meets Celia. The relationship is now one of equals. Celia, a headstrong young woman, decides that she must try and develop the relationship or risk losing Adrian. Adrian is torn between his desire for Celia and his need to protect his family, who are now having financial problems. The story moves from the battlefields of Flanders to Castle Drogo, where the characters are reunited for brief periods. Faith and love are stretched to their limits as each character is affected by the relentless brutality of the war. Of All Faiths & None is the story of a lost generation. It is a novel that focuses on the relationships of the characters until those relationships are shattered. It is a coming-of-age tale and a social commentary on the tragedy of a needless war.
Writer, lawyer and chef. Andrew has written books on law and engineering contracts. In 2004 he started writing his debut novel Of All Faiths & None, which took eighteen years to complete. It is the first book in a series about the Drewe and Lutyens families throughout the 20th century.
Have you ever thought your family would make an excellent reality show? I sure have!
In My Life Should Be a Reality Show: Act One, I’ve shared some of my favorite tweets, texts, snippets of conversations, short tales, and photographs surrounding the comical happenings of my lovely family.
Donna Glass is an award-winning author who loves to laugh. And, wow, her laugh is boisterous! In her free time, she’s either reading a book or playing a game with the family.
Donna’s first publication (Be a Superhero in the Kitchen: children’s cookbook) is available through her site and on Amazon.
Their pull was undeniable, like fireworks on top of flaming bonfires.
After Anna James loses nearly everyone she loves and is betrayed by those she trusted, she sets out in search of a place that would bring her peace. She knew she had found it when she arrived in a sleepy little town called Silver Cliff and she vows to never trust anyone with her heart again, especially a man she fears would not only break her heart, he’d incinerate it.
Nathan Kent has dealt with his own heartache and demons from getting off the path he was meant to be on. He decides to return to his home town to rebuild his life and the last thing he needs is to fall in love with a snarky girl who keeps her past under lock and key. He realizes quickly, though, that she is girl worth risking it all for and vows to make her his.
Their pull was undeniable, like fireworks on top of flaming bonfires. But Anna can’t help wonder if she and Nathan are strong enough to survive a past that keeps resurfacing or if fate will keep shattering the world around her.
What the hell was she thinking agreeing to this? She hadn’t seen Nathan since she went to his house to apologize and they shared not only a moment but an almost kiss, and now…now she was going out to dinner with him and the girls and freakin’ Joshua Dale. She liked Josh, and she actually felt bad about turning him down when he asked her out on a date. He was a good guy, sweet, funny, definitely cute, especially in his deputy uniform, but there hadn’t been a spark. Even if there had been, she still would have said no. Men like that were too easy to fall for and trust. Men like that would inevitably hurt her. The biggest difference between men like Josh and Trevor was that Josh would feel bad about it.
With Nathan, though, there wasn’t just a spark. There were fireworks…fireworks on top of flaming bonfires added to all the burners on the stove going at once and mixed with all the chemicals overreacting to each other in a lab. She was sure she could come up with even more metaphors, but she’d already made her brain hurt from overthinking things. Nathan did not just have the potential to break her heart, he could incinerate it.
This wasn’t a date, she told herself again. It was a group outing. That would be her mantra tonight.
She changed her clothes several times, made sure her makeup—though she didn’t wear much—looked flawless, and she wondered if Nathan preferred her hair up or down. Not a date. Not a date. Not. A. Date.
Okay, so maybe it really wasn’t a date, but a huge part of her wished that it was. She liked him…much more than she wanted to. How could I let this happen? She removed the clip from her hair, letting her silken locks fall straight past her shoulders. She sat on her bed with her head in her hands, berating herself for allowing these feelings. As if I had a choice. He somehow barreled into her life out of nowhere, demanding she reveal all of herself to him, and the worst part was that she wanted to. If she wasn’t running into him, she was thinking about him or thinking about ways to avoid thinking about him. And here she was just minutes ago, wondering which way she thought he would prefer her hair to be styled.
Distance. I need some distance. She would not be able to avoid him entirely, but she could try to limit the time she spent around him. That seemed like the best course of action, only the thought of not seeing him suddenly hurt her heart.
“Fuck!” She flung herself backward onto the bed, slamming her palms down on the mattress.
The doorbell rang. “Down it is,” she said, referring to her hair. When she opened the door, Nathan stood there wearing a cocky grin.
“Hi.”
“Um…hello.” Anna barely recognized her own voice. It came out as a sort of breathy squeak. She tried to peer past Nathan, into his car, but there was no one else with him.
Nathan turned his head to look behind him. When he turned back to face her, confusion marred his features. “Are you looking for something?”
“Where’s Ruby?” Ruby was supposed to be picking her up, Carla was meeting them at the restaurant right after her shift, and she wasn’t sure how Josh was getting to the restaurant.
“Ruby had a few last-minute errands, so I offered to pick you up.”
Anna finally realized she was being rude by not inviting him in, so she gestured him inside. “I’ll just go grab my bag.”
“My bag,” he mimicked in an exaggerated New York accent, making Anna laugh.
“Right, you guys say purse.” For the most part, Anna’s accent was nondescript, but certain choices of words and the pronunciations of them were definitely very Brooklyn. “You lived in the city. You should be used to it by now.”
“Mostly everyone I knew were transplants just like me, but I did get my daily dose of New Yawk City speak.”
“Oh shut it,” she said playfully. “We know there’s an r in there. I’ll just go grab my little ole purse.”
“No rush,” she heard him say on the way to her bedroom. There was still a trace of humor in his voice.
Something had just occurred to her. Bag forgotten, she walked back out into the living room.
“Wait, are we being set up again?” She was going to kill Carla. This was surely her doing. “Are they all going to come up with some excuse and not show up, leaving just the two of us at dinner?”
Nathan looked confused, or annoyed, at the possibility. She couldn’t tell which. “No. As far as I know, both Carla and Ruby are still coming, and you and I are going to go grab Josh from the station.”
Well that won’t be awkward at all, she thought. She went back into her room to grab her purse, and after locking up, they walked back to his car in silence.
Elena Kincaid is an award-winning and Amazon best-selling author. She writes Paranormal and Contemporary Romances with alpha males who stop at nothing to protect their women, heroines who are anything but damsels in distress, and stories where the only love worth fighting for is the forever kind of love.
She was born in Ukraine and raised in New York, where she currently lives with her daughter. Her desk is constantly cluttered with journals, sticky notes, and torn-out pieces of paper full of ideas. When not working, Elena loves to spend time with her family, travel the globe, curl up with a good book, and catch up on her soaps.
Content Rating: PG + M. The book does allude to suicide in one poem and discusses grief and depression in some of the others. There may one or two words of profanity
“She has the ability to convey to the reader some of the most complex thoughts into words that truly reach our hearts.” — Love Books
“Her lyric voice speaks with careful observation and passion. In the narrative mode, she is masterful in reading life around her. Kyrian possesses the sensitivity, insight, and soul of the true poet. Her writing provides a primer on how to compose meaningful poetry.” — Lou Jones
Book Description:
This collection consists primarily of poems written during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of loneliness and rumination.
Lyndon’s poetry stems from intense emotions that swing from one end of the pendulum to the other as she captures the agony of love and loss, along with innocent joy and lighthearted fun.
Each poem is an earnest response to life, love, and everything in between.
Kyrian Lyndon is the author of Shattering Truths, the first book in her Deadly Veils series. She has also published three poetry collections, A Dark Rose Blooms, Remnants of Severed Chains, and Awake with the Songbirds – Poems from the Pandemic. Kyrian began writing short stories and fairy tales when she was just eight years old. In her adolescence, she moved on to poetry. At sixteen, while working as an editor for her high school newspaper, she wrote her first novel, and then completed two more novels at the ages of nineteen and twenty-five.
She is forthcoming about being a person with many years of recovery, as well as a trauma survivor. Throughout her journeys, she expressed her thoughts through poetry, embracing every challenge to triumph over adversity. In her conviction that learning, growing, healing, and evolving is a never-ending process, she remains as grateful for the dark days as she is for every flicker of hope and light. She considers herself a cheerleader for those trudging on against all odds in the hopes of living their dreams.
Born and raised in Woodside, Queens, New York, Kyrian was the middle of three daughters born to immigrants –her father from Campochiaro, Italy; her mother from Havana, Cuba. She has worked primarily in executive-level administrative positions with major New York publishing companies.
Kyrian loves nineteenth-century British literature, parallel universe fiction, and dark romanticism. She also enjoys music, art, history, fitness, and cooking.
Profilers, from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, uncover the disturbing legacy of a brilliant sociopath.
Agent Christopher Banks must lead his team, as they search for an UnSub, who draws his team into a case unlike any the bureau has ever dealt with.
A troubled teenage girl’s chance encounter with an opportunistic predator force the agents to dig deep, into both their playbook and their souls.
Located on a secluded property outside Evergreen Montana. His team faces a moral dilemma as abhorrent as the crime. Agent Banks and his team employ the latest technology and enter, this UnSub’s dark, twisted world. A world one of them may not escape.
What took decades to develop, the team must race to solve. The UnSub, his victims and a community that will be changed forever.
(review request submitted by the author for an honest critique)
White or Black…Grey left me feeling disgusted, appalled, heartbroken, furious, and hopeful. Above all else, I was shocked.
Shocked at the level of evilness one man possessed.
Shocked at the horrors the young children faced and the amount of time spent in hell.
Shocked at the strength demonstrated by victims. How anyone survived that nightmarish environment was mind-boggling.
Fear.Joseph Melesh, the author, allowed us to experience every second of the prisoners’ fear and pain. I heard the rats, felt their tiny teeth gnawing and pulling on the clothes. I heard the victims scream. My heart broke for them.
What makes this worse? This scenario is possible. Similar situations have occurred. Remembering this fact makes this story all the more realistic… more devastating.
This is not a pretty story, but it is a great story. If I could, I would give this story more than five stars (hearts).
Joseph Melesh is an Ontario based crime fiction writer and suspense thriller junkie. His unique writing style will quickly draw you into his world.
Tormented by his dreams, he crafts and shapes his characters. Thrusting his heroes and villains into challenges, they could never dream of. You will cry for and cheer on his victims and find yourself in shock as you find yourself feeling the pain that his villains have lived through.
Joseph’s immersive dialogue and vivid scenery, give his readers the movie theatre experience, right there in the palm of their hands.
Pretzel-like plot twists, that keep his readers guessing and incredible reveals, make his books truly hard to put down.
