'Intricate and crisp, witty and solemn. Line by line, silent and adroit, it opens a series of trap-doors in the reader's imagination' Hilary Mantel, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall Welcome back to Rotherweird. The town of Rotherweird has been independent from the rest of England for four hundred years, to protect a deadly secret. Sir Veronal Slickstone is dead, his bid to exploit that secret consigned to dust, leaving Rotherweird to resume its abnormal normality after the travails of the summer . . . but someone is playing a very long game. Disturbing omens multiply: a funeral delivers a cryptic warning; an ancient portrait speaks; the Herald disappears - and democracy threatens the uneasy covenant between town and countryside. Geryon Wynter's intricate plot, centuries in the making, is on the move. Everything points to one objective: the resurrection of Rotherweird's dark Elizabethan past - and to one date: the Winter Equinox. Wynter is coming . . . 'Baroque, Byzantine and beautiful - not to mention bold. An enthralling puzzle picture of a book' M. R. Carey, bestselling author of The Girl With All The Gifts

Author Biography

Andrew Caldecott was seized by the notion of a city-state hiding a cataclysmic secret while studying history at New College Oxford. After graduating, he went on to become one of the country's top QCs specialising in media, defamation and libel law. He represented the BBC in the Hutton Inquiry (into the death of biological warfare expert and UN weapons inspector David Kelly), the Guardian in the Leveson Inquiry (into the British press following the phone-hacking scandal), and supermodel Naomi Campbell in her landmark privacy case, amongst many others. This hasn't left him much time for writing, but the rich, layered world of Rotherweird has been nagging in the background of his mind for many years, and has at last burst into blossom, at once of-the-moment, historic and timeless. Rotherweird: 'A history-tragic-comedy all rolled into one', says Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, and 'baroque, Byzantine and beautiful,' according to M.R, Carey, author of The Girl with all the Gifts. Rotherweird will be followed by a sequel, Wyntertide.