Pirates and Patriots is Published Today

Congratulations to David Field, whose gripping nautical adventure, Pirates and Patriots, is out now!

Pirates and Patriots is the first novel in The New World Nautical Saga Series: historical adventures set during the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond.

England, 1554

Fifteen-year-old Francis Drake is realising his dream of sailing on the open seas. After training with his cousins William and John Hawkins in their naval business, he takes his first commission upon the Bonaventure.

But when disaster strikes the ship and Francis saves the men with his quick-thinking, he makes an enemy of the captain, who threatens to charge Francis with mutiny.

Francis must seek a new path to make his fortune and he joins with the Hawkins brothers to search for glory in foreign lands.

But trading on the world stage is already being dominated by Spanish and Portuguese explorers and so Francis must act quickly if he wishes to make his mark.

And as one Tudor queen makes way for another, and Spanish relations grow ever tenser, Francis Drake may soon be needed to help save his country from the threat of war…

Congratulations to Tim Chant, whose page-turning nautical adventure, The War for Tripoli, is out now! The War for Tripoli is the third book in the Marcus Baxter Naval Thrillers series.

1911

Itinerant seaman Marcus Baxter has landed in Constantinople. Short of funds and lacking allegiance to any government, he is keen to sell his services to the highest bidder.

With Italy intent on capturing the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, it seems that war is on the horizon and fighting men will soon be in demand.

As a battle-hardened sailor, it isn’t long before Baxter is approached by Hiram Bogue, an American sea captain in league with the Committee of Union and Progress — an Ottoman revolutionary organisation.

Enticed by the amount of money on offer, Baxter agrees to train new recruits aboard the Residye, a proposed blockade runner, as well as overseeing the refit of the vessel.

With the growing threat of attack by the Italian navy, the assignment grows ever more dangerous.

And when war finally erupts, Baxter is forced to propel his inexperienced crew and ill-equipped vessel into action.

But with such a formidable enemy, will he survive long enough to claim his earnings…?

Justin Fox is the author of the Jack Pembroke Naval Thriller series: authentic British Navy war stories set during the Second World War.

I grew up around boats and the sea has always been an important part of my life and my writing. Our family spent holidays in an old house in Simon’s Town, the former Royal Navy base in South Africa, and from an early age I knocked about in anything that floats: rowing boats, sailing dinghies, windsurfers and yachts. My reading as a boy was also nautically orientated, particularly naval yarns by the likes of Douglas Reeman, Patrick O’Brian, Nicholas Monsarrat and CS Forester.

After leaving school, my two years of national service in the South African Defence Force were spent in the navy, based in Simon’s Town. During that period, I had six months at sea on a replica medieval caravel sailing down the Atlantic from Portugal to South Africa in a re-enactment of the voyage of Bartholomew Dias in 1487. The first book I ever wrote (never published) was the story of that voyage.

When I later joined Getaway travel magazine as a photojournalist, I volunteered for any boating assignment: sailing a brigantine around the Seychelles, a felucca down the Nile, a pirogue to Timbuktu, island-hopping by catamaran around Madagascar, taking the mail ship to St Helena Island and sailing a dhow up the Kenyan coast (which provided material for my Somali pirate novel, Whoever Fears the Sea, published by Sapere).

My Jack Pembroke series is inspired by my love of history and the sea, but I also aimed to bring to the fore a theatre of World War II that is not well known and is little written about: the fighting off the South African coast that resulted in the loss of more than 150 Allied ships.

I live in a flat in Cape Town and my desk overlooks the city’s anchorage. Watching the ships come and go each day, I often think of the war years when thousands of vessels were routed around the Cape. When a convoy was in town, Table Bay would be crammed with more than fifty ships, all of them needing protection. In place of today’s yachts and pleasure craft puttering jauntily out of the V&A Waterfront, minesweepers and anti-submarine vessels would make their daily round of the bay.

During the war, the Cape of Good Hope became a vital strategic point on the sea route around the continent and was particularly important during the North African campaign. Once Italy entered the war in 1940, the Mediterranean became too dangerous for Allied convoys, and most were diverted around the Cape. Much preparation was needed before Nazi warships made their way to Africa’s southern tip. The Royal Navy base in Simon’s Town had to be expanded and reinforced, and a fledgling South African Navy created almost from scratch.

First came the German surface raiders, then the U-boats. They attacked within sight of the coast and near the entrance to the harbours of Cape Town and Durban. There are incredible stories of heroism and cloak-and-dagger raids around our coast. For instance, one U-boat slipped into Table Bay and its captain allowed his crew on deck to see the bright lights of Sea Point (of course, all German cities were blacked out at the time). There are many apocryphal stories that surfaced in the folklore of coastal towns, such as German sailors coming ashore and playing soccer with Nazi-sympathising locals, spies passing on information about Allied ship movements and farmers replenishing U-boats around Cape Agulhas.

Like many South African children of my generation, I had a fascination with World War II. I built model ships and aeroplanes, played war games in our suburban garden and devoured books about the great campaigns. But I was always mildly disappointed that most of the stories were about the North, and that South Africa seldom featured in the accounts.

During my time in the navy, I began to learn a little bit about the battles fought in local waters and became interested in the exploits of South Africa’s ‘little ships’. If the actions of raiders, U-boats and convoys were soon forgotten by the general public after the war, the exploits of minesweepers and anti-submarine vessels hardly received mention at all. Yet the industrious, daily patrols by these ships kept South African ports open and took the fight to the U-boat wolf packs. It is that story that forms the backdrop to the first two Jack Pembroke adventure novels, The Cape Raider and The Wolf Hunt.

Congratulations to Tim Chant, whose exhilarating nautical action novel, Mutiny on the Potemkin, is published today!

Mutiny on the Potemkin is the second book in the Marcus Baxter naval thriller series: action-packed, authentic historical adventures following former Royal Navy officer Marcus Baxter during the early 1900s.

Marcus Baxter may have survived one naval battle, but his troubles are far from over.

Despite serving with the Russian navy aboard the Yaroslovich, he is arrested by the Tsarist secret police for conspiracy and sent west on the Trans-Siberian railway to St. Petersburg. Competing factions within the secret police disrupt his journey and he finds himself in Odessa.

Odessa, though, is in the grip of revolutionary riots and Baxter finds himself trapped in the city as violence and anarchy spreads.

The crew of the Potemkin has mutinied, killing most of the officers and bringing the battleship into port.

When Baxter realises a friend is trapped in the carnage, he is determined to get onboard the battleship.

But will he make it out alive?

 

Click here to order Mutiny on the Potemkin

We are thrilled to announce that we have recently welcomed three brilliant new authors to our contemporary romance and historical fiction lists. We look forward to sharing their wonderful work with the world!

Tim Chant is working on an exciting historical naval thriller series. The first instalment – THE STRAITS OF TSUSHIMA – is set in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese war and follows the daring exploits of Marcus Baxter, a British Royal Navy officer turned spy.

THE STRAITS OF TSUSHIMA is due out in 2021.

Teresa F Morgan is working on a fabulous three-book contemporary romance series. Set in Cornwall, her novels have a strong sense of place and a unique sunny charm. Her first book, COCKTAILS AT KITTIWAKE COVE, sees ambitious restauranteur Rhianna Price arrive in the area looking for a fresh start. But when she runs into her holiday fling, Rhianna’s focus is put to the test…

COCKTAILS AT KITTIWAKE COVE is due out in 2021.

Tanya Jean Russell writes heart-warming romantic fiction. Her first book will be a seasonal novel called AN IMPERFECT CHRISTMAS, a moving and uplifting tale that follows Maggie Green, a young accountant who returns to her hometown and is forced to face her first love.

AN IMPERFECT CHRISTMAS will be published in late 2020.

Happy new year to all of our wonderful authors and readers, and thank you for your continued faith and support! 2019 saw us expand our list with some incredible titles and we can’t wait to share more with you this year.

Here’s what to expect from 2020:

We will soon launch our non-fiction list, led by Sapere co-founder Richard Simpson. Richard is on the lookout for military history titles – backlist in particular – and aims to launch the first few books on our second anniversary in March.

Our ‘call for nautical fiction’ has been successful and we will soon be releasing Irving A. Greenfield’s Depth Force series – thrilling submarine adventures set in the 90s, as well as the first in a series of Second World War naval thrillers by Justin Fox, and a trilogy of Tudor nautical adventure books by David Field.

We also have plenty of exciting new projects from our current authors, so look out for the next books in the series you already love! These include the final instalment of Alexandra Walsh’s Marquess House Trilogy; the next ghostly adventure in Linda Stratmann’s Mina Scarletti series; a new Lady Fan regency mystery from Elizabeth Bailey and a return of Charles Dickens as private investigator in J C Briggs’ Victorian series.

We also have brand new authors launching next year and plenty more fan favourites! Make sure you sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with our latest releases and monthly deals.

Are you working on a new series set in the Age of Sail? Have you written a naval thriller set during the World Wars? Are you passionate about seafaring stories? Sapere Books wants to hear from you!

We are actively looking to acquire nautical fiction from both debut and established authors. We are particularly interested in historical naval fiction, nautical thrillers, and books in a series.

If you are an author who owns the rights to a previously published naval series, or a writer working on a new nautical novel, please get in touch and tell us about it!

Email our Editorial Director, Amy Durant, directly with some information about your nautical writing and a synopsis of your naval novel and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

We hope to hear from you soon!