Blog Archives
Drinking from the Stream
Drinking from the Stream follows two young men on the run from themselves. Jake, a Nebraska kid turned Louisiana roughneck, flees the guilt of a killing on an oil rig. Karl, a disillusioned American student at Oxford, escapes the wreckage of the sixties and a painful relationship. Their paths cross, and they drift through Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania in the early seventies, bumping into coups, massacres and love affairs as they go. The book stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes region of Africa and on to Chile, and it ties private coming-of-age stories to state violence and postcolonial chaos.
I felt like the writing landed with real weight. The prose has muscle and rhythm, and it keeps a steady pace through long stretches of travel and talk. Scenes on the road, in trucks, on ferries, and in cheap guesthouses felt vivid to me. Dialogues carry a lot of the load. Characters argue about politics, race, faith, and guilt, and the conversations feel relaxed on the surface but tense underneath. I could sense the author’s years in Africa in the way a village lane or a border crossing appears in a few sharp strokes. The flip side is density. Historical detail piles up. I stayed invested in Jake and Karl, and in Beatrice, Bridget and the others, because the book lets them be flawed, funny and sometimes selfish, not just mouthpieces for a lesson.
The novel looks at racism and antisemitism inside Jake’s own story, then places him in countries where mass killing happens out in the open and on a terrifying scale. It plays with the dream of revolution and tears it apart. Young Westerners arrive full of ideals, then watch soldiers and militias burn those ideals along with villages. The book keeps asking who gets to walk away and who does not. Jake carries private guilt from the rig into places where guilt comes in rivers. Karl drags his Vietnam-era anger into a world where America is almost irrelevant. I felt anger, shame, and sadness while I read, and also a stubborn hope, because the story keeps circling back to friendship, loyalty, and small acts of courage. The novel does not pretend to solve anything. It simply puts you close to the fire and forces you to look.
I would recommend Drinking from the Stream to readers who enjoy historical fiction with grit, to people curious about East Africa in the early seventies, and to anyone who likes character-driven travel stories with real moral stakes. The book asks for patience and a strong stomach. It pays that back with a rich sense of place, big emotions, and a set of memorable characters.
Pages: 377 | ASIN : B0DXLQTN5M
The Communist Question
Jeanne The Woman in Red is a work of biographical fiction based on the life of Jeanne Tunica Y Casas, a fiery, uncompromising political activist, feminist, communist, and a woman of courage. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
If I had written a non-fiction account of Jeanne’s life and work, it would have sounded robotic and lacking in truth. Fiction was the only way to delve deep into her life and times. Many people she knew and worked with had passed away or were reluctant to speak or give any information. I understand and respect that, but facts, figures, and exact dates would have been missing. There is not much out there in English, and the work done, predominantly by a New Caledonian historian, provided a solid foundation from which to write. I had access to her articles, tracts, and speeches, and I was able to integrate this into the story as they had been written—typos and all.
I have always been inspired by strong characters in fiction and non-fiction. I was drawn to Jeanne straightaway. I had just arrived in New Caledonia for three years, and I was browsing its history, and I came across Jeanne. I wanted to visit her at the cemetery, pay my respects, but I discovered she had been buried in a common grave. I could not believe it. Disheartened but determined, I contacted the administration and decided that writing the book is only half of it. I wanted her recognised with a plaque. She fought for the rights of exploited peoples, and I wanted to fight for her legacy. Her remains were located, and a plaque now recognises her at a local cemetery. It has been a hard but satisfying journey.
What were some ideas that were important for you to share in this book?
Her relationship with her lover turned husband, Paco. The communist question. How much or how little did she know about Stalin’s atrocities? The right of women to vote. I wanted back-and-forth chapters where her life in the nursing home meets the past.
Did you find anything in your research of this story that surprised you?
I was surprised that she had lived in Australia for a while and opened up a restaurant in Sydney. Her continual battle with the authorities. She never gave up. I was also disappointed with a few reactions as if writing about a communist makes the writer a communist. This is not the case, and I could never have placed 2020 eyes on Jeanne’s life and get away with writing her story.
What is one thing that you hope readers take away from Jeanne The Woman in Red?
That she, like many others, must be remembered for inspiring and encouraging change without violence, and that history, far from being cancelled, should be remembered and studied – the good and the bad and learn the lessons on how to move forward. I am not just talking about feminists and politicians, but people who did not have a public role but were instrumental in shaping future generations.
The book has been translated into French and will soon be released.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Jeanne The Woman In Red
Jeanne The Woman in Red is a literary historical novel that follows the life of Jeanne Tunica Y Casas, a fiery, uncompromising political activist whose story unfolds across New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, France, and beyond. The book moves between her final years in a nursing home in the late 1960s and vivid recollections of her political battles, her marriage to Paco, and the people and places she loved. It’s a portrait of a woman who refuses to soften or apologize, even as age and loss begin to close in around her.
This book feels intimate. As if Jeanne were sitting across from me, telling stories that run on nerves and conviction rather than nostalgia. The writing has a rawness I didn’t expect. Scenes of the nursing home feel almost claustrophobic with their vinyl chairs, faint smells, and the slow drip of Jeanne’s frustration. Then the narrative swings wide open into her past, where she teaches children under mango trees, writes furious letters, argues politics with anyone brave enough, and paints scenes that reveal more about her spirit than any speech could. The author’s choice to weave Jeanne’s inner voice with historical detail gives the story both grit and tenderness. It is a quiet kind of political novel, but political all the same, carried by the force of one woman who refuses to be small.
What struck me most was how unapologetically the book stays with Jeanne’s contradictions. She is compassionate one moment and sharp enough to cut the next. She is grieving but stubborn. She is certain of her beliefs, sometimes to the point of alienating those who might have helped her. And yet the book never asks me to judge her. It just lets her be. Some passages read like memories folded in warm light, while others hit like sudden blows. The sensory details work best when they’re simple: a wooden floorboard Paco never fixed, a pot of chrysanthemums at a grave, the sound of children giggling through a vocabulary lesson. The author trusts these small images to carry weight, and they do.
This isn’t a sweeping epic or a fast-moving plot. It’s more like sitting with someone who has lived too intensely to fade gently. The genre sits somewhere between literary fiction and biographical historical fiction, and it will appeal most to readers who like character-driven stories, real history woven with imagination, and portraits of complicated women who challenge the world rather than charm it.
Pages: 213 | ASIN : B08CPNPNDV
Parental Love and Support
Orphans of the Living tells the story of a family’s complicated history spanning from 1920s Mississippi through decades of poverty and social change. What inspired you to write this novel?
The novel is based on my mother’s own family, of which I knew little. But things in the past have a habit of invading us today, and the more I researched, the more I realized my mother’s lived experiences influenced my life, and my children’s lives, in ways I had not understood. Yes, this is a novel, but the skeleton, the bones of the story, are real. It is a hell of a story, and I wanted to dig deeper into it.
Can you share with us a little about the research that went into putting this book together?
I really had three sources. Here’s how they came into play, for instance, in my grandfather’s sojourn in Mexico. I had the bits and pieces my mother gave to me in her life, between bouts of addiction and mental illness, such as “My father went to Mexico to grow bananas.” I explored the vast trove of information and connection at Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, such as records of my grandfather’s trip to San Francisco, where he took a steamer to Mexico, and a manifest for a ship that brought him and his bananas to Galveston. And the third piece was how I followed what I learned from Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com. For example, I spent a lot of time learning how bananas were grown and raised in the tropics, and how United Fruit, then one of the largest corporations in the world — owned by men from the American South — employed Jim Crow tactics to control their labor force in Central and South America. Weaving all these sources together was an act of imagination and conjecture, and that’s why it’s a novel, not non-fiction.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
So much about this era, and these people felt so current to me: the multi-generational impact of poverty, racism, inequality, sexism; the experiences of people who were at the margins, lacking education, perhaps confused about their gender or sexual orientation, long before there was any general knowledge of these issues; the impact of Western expansion and “manifest destiny” on how average Americans in the west thought about land and success; the importance of parental love and support.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have completed a memoir that is in many ways a sequel to Orphans of the Living. She Writes Press will publish it in spring 2027. And I’m way deep into writing a third book, another novel, a near-future political thriller.
Author Links: GoodReads | Threads | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
In the shadow of the Great Depression and Jim Crow south of the 1930s, an impoverished white family escapes—with the help of Black sharecroppers—from a vengeful Mississippi plantation overseer intent on lynching them. Arriving in California to start a new life, Barney and Lula Stovall are haunted by the past, the children they’ve left behind, and the daughter they cannot love or protect.
Orphans of the Living follows the peripatetic life of the Stovall family, woven from four parallel stories: Barney and Lula Stovall, and two of their nine children, Glen and Nora Mae.
Their California sojourn—from their hardscrabble dairy farm, to the brig at the San Francisco Presidio, to the building of the Golden Gate Bridge—lead them on paths toward each other and forgiveness. But redemption doesn’t come to them all.
Orphans of the Living: A Novel
Orphans of the Living is a novel steeped in generational trauma, racial violence, and the slow unraveling of the American dream. Kathy Watson tells the story of Lula Stovall and her tangled family history, spanning from a Mississippi plantation in the 1920s through decades of poverty, migration, and social change. Lula, a white sharecropper’s wife, becomes both victim and agent in a life defined by loss and desperation. The novel, inspired by Watson’s own family, shifts between perspectives and decades, revealing how choices, often forced, sometimes chosen, echo through generations. It is part historical fiction, part personal reckoning, layered with the grit of real events and imagined truths.
Watson’s writing hits like a storm. The language is raw, unvarnished, and aching with honesty. The prose feels lived-in, like the old quilts and wood stoves that fill her characters’ homes. The pain is immediate and unrelenting. Lula’s desperate act with a piece of fencing wire early in the book stunned me. Not just because of what happened, but because of how real it felt. Watson doesn’t write for comfort. She writes to bear witness. There were moments when I had to put the book down and walk away, not because I didn’t want to keep going, but because it hurt too much to stay in the scene. That kind of writing is rare.
But it’s not just the writing that stuck with me. It’s the ambition of the book. Watson dives deep into race, class, history, and motherhood, often all at once. She gives space to the Black characters in Lula’s orbit, making sure they aren’t just there to prop up a white story. Violet Byrd, especially, is a force. Her presence radiates power and calm in a world built to crush her. The author makes the brave decision to include racist language and brutal events for historical accuracy. Nothing in this book is simple. No character is purely good or purely bad. Everyone is just trying to survive.
Orphans of the Living is not just a story about one woman’s brutal life. It’s about inheritance. What we’re given, what we pass on, and what we bury. I respected the story deeply. It’s a hard, unblinking book that left me gutted, moved, and wide awake. I’d recommend this book to readers who aren’t afraid of discomfort. If you’re drawn to stories like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, this will resonate. It’s a hard read, emotionally, but one worth sticking with. Anyone interested in Southern history, generational trauma, or the quiet violence of poverty should read this.
Pages: 352 | ISBN : 978-1647429782
Lesser-Known Story
Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies follows two women, a former SOE operative and an MI6 agent, who secretly enter Poland to meet with a sleeper agent and anti-communist insurgents, not realizing their mission has been compromised by a mole deep inside British intelligence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story takes place against the backdrop of the Cold War and was inspired by three historical events – the Polish anti-communist insurgency, a covert British intelligence operation to roll back communism in Poland and throughout the Baltic to the borders of the USSR, and the Cambridge spy ring. I wanted to create a story that highlighted this lesser-known story of the Cold War era.
Most people do not realize that when WWII ended in Europe in May 1945, fighting continued in Poland for another 8 years. Poles continued to fight for their independence from the Soviet-backed, communist government until the anti-communist insurgency was finally crushed in 1953.
The insurgency received covert assistance from the British, who infiltrated agents, fighters, arms, and money into Poland and throughout the Baltic. Unfortunately, the British operation was undermined from the start. The Soviets were tipped off to the British plans, most likely by Kim Philby and Donald Maclean, two members of the notorious Cambridge Five. Over the life of Operation Jungle, the British infiltrated nearly 250 agents into the region. Every agent was either killed, captured, or turned.
What character did you enjoy writing for? Was there one that was more challenging to write for?
Many of the characters in my book are based on people who actually lived. The character Luba Haas is one of my favorite characters and I based her on a woman who was arguably Great Britain’s greatest spy during WWII, Krystyna Skarbek, or Christine Granville as she was known in the UK. She was a heroic character, and her real-life exploits are legendary. But the character that was the most challenging to write for was the main antagonist, Lt. Colonel Yuri Sokolov. This character was also based on a real person, a man by the name of Vasili Blokhin, who was Stalin’s handpicked executioner. Blokhin is said to have executed more than 10,000 prisoners by his own hand, including around 7,000 at the Katyn Massacre in 1940. He’s even listed in the Guinness World Records with the ignominious title of “most prolific executioner.” It would have been easy to fall back onto stereotypes when writing him. Blokhin was an alcoholic and mentally unstable. But we actually learn about what made him the man he would become. It doesn’t excuse his actions – both Blokhin and Sokolov are incredibly cruel characters, but they are also complex characters with deep emotional scars. Showing the human side of a murderous psychopath was challenging.
How did you balance the action scenes with the story elements and still keep a fast pace in the story?
I’d love to take full credit for that, but I have to say that my editor, a remarkable woman named Caroljean Gavin really helped me maintain the intensity and keep the book flowing. Her developmental edits really helped me sustain that page-turning tension throughout the book. She helped me find a way to keep the reader engaged by creating scenes that made them always want more at the end of each chapter.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’m continuing with the Cold War theme with another lesser-known story of the era. I am currently working on a book that has a working title, The Missiles of Vogelsang. It is a novel, and it is based upon what I call the world’s first missile crisis. In 1959, three years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets deployed nuclear missiles to East Germany. These were the same missiles they attempted to place in Cuba three years later. I’m in the early stages of writing but I hope to publish sometime in 2026.
Author Links: Goodreads | Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Website | Amazon
Inspired by the true events of Poland’s anti-communist insurgency, the Cambridge Five spy scandal, and a covert MI6 operation which attempted to rollback communism to the borders of the USSR, Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies sheds light on a lesser-known story of the Cold War and immerses readers into the shadowy world of counterintelligence and spy versus spy operations.
Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies
After reading Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies by Karl Wegener, I’m left both shaken and impressed. The novel is a slow-burning but deeply immersive espionage thriller set against the backdrop of post-World War II Poland. It follows a deadly cat-and-mouse game between Soviet-backed Polish authorities and remnants of the Polish Home Army. The story unfolds with brutal precision, opening with a horrific ambush and evolving into a tightly woven narrative of deceit, identity, and revenge. At the center of it all is Ada Bialik, a woman shaped by war and driven by a quiet, burning fury. Through calculated acts of rebellion and sharp instincts, she becomes the most compelling figure in a world where trust is rare and survival depends on cunning.
I found Wegener’s writing to be razor-sharp in its detail and emotional depth. The characters aren’t just chess pieces in a war story—they’re raw, bruised humans, often trying to make sense of a world shattered by ideology. The language is spare but impactful, often letting silence and implication carry emotional weight. I appreciated that. The dialogue never felt forced. It carried a natural, believable rhythm, which grounded the story in a gritty realism. There’s also a strong visual element—the way forest paths, bloodied uniforms, and stark interrogation rooms are described pulls you in like scenes from a black-and-white film. I found myself holding my breath during key sequences.
But what really got to me was the moral fog that hangs over everything. There are no clean hands in this book. Wegener doesn’t preach, doesn’t glorify violence, but he doesn’t flinch from it either. Some parts made me uncomfortable, like the cold way Lieutenant Colonel Sokolov manipulates others, or how easily people vanish into the system. And yet, it all felt real. That murkiness is part of the book’s strength. It reminds you that history isn’t neat. The idealists don’t always win. People betray each other. Sometimes for survival. Sometimes for belief. Sometimes for nothing at all. The emotional undercurrent is subtle but devastating.
I’d recommend Operation Nightfall to anyone who loves historical fiction with a hard edge, especially fans of John le Carré or Alan Furst. If you’re looking for a tidy, good-guys-win sort of spy story, this isn’t it. But if you want a gripping tale of loyalty, survival, and the deep scars left by war, this book delivers in spades. It stays with you. I’m still thinking about Ada. Still wondering what justice looks like in a world built on lies.
Pages: 336 | ASIN : B0DBN6CD4X
A Tribute to my Mother
The Secretary follows a British woman working for M16 who goes undercover in the British embassy in Moscow, where she starts an affair with a journalist also undercover while searching for a possible traitor. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Lois Vale is a fictionalised version of my late mother, Joy, and I wrote the novel as a tribute to her. My parents met in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, and my sister and I grew up with tales of their romance tailed by the KGB and how they would dig listening devices out of apartment walls. Her 1958 diary was a wonderful find; it was clear she had deliberately left it for us. In her 80s, she had finally admitted to me that she had worked for MI6, though I had long had my suspicions. The diary made sense of the stories she had shared and put them in context. She actually did have a German journalist boyfriend for a while in Moscow, and always spoke fondly of him. I based the structure of the novel broadly on events in the diary, from her initial train journey from Helsinki to Moscow on the night express, to her trips to Vienna and the Black Sea. Though the spy story in the novel is complete fiction, it is rooted in contemporaneous historical fact.
The characters in The Secretary are very complex. What is your process for creating such in-depth characters?
I tried to be as truthful as possible. I always had a lovely relationship with my mother and as I grew up we became close friends and confidantes. I knew, admired – wished I had – her qualities. Writing her character was a question of doing her justice. She was interesting to be with, always elegantly self-effacing and calm, with flashes of sharp humour, and conversations with her were memorable. I drew on years of remembered conversations to build the characters around her; though almost all of them are entirely imaginary, some spring from her observations of people she mixed with in Moscow and subsequently in embassies across the world, and others come from my own reading, fiction and non-fiction, about that era.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The unsung and underestimated role of women in intelligence in the 1950s is a crucial aspect of the novel. Also the question of loyalty and betrayal: how loyalty may not be reciprocated, and how there might even be a moral component of betrayal.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
I’m working on the third novel in the fun French cozy mystery series I write with my husband Rob under the name Serena Kent. Death in Provence and Death in Avignon came out in 2018 and 2019, so this next episode has been a long time coming, interrupted by my determination to bring The Secretary to fruition. After all the delays, I don’t dare promise imminent publication!
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A tense Cold War spy story told from the perspective of a bright, young, working-class woman recruited to MI6 at a time when men were in charge of making history and women were expendable.
LITERARY TITAN 