Happy New Year everyone. A quick catch-up post as I get my head back into work-mode after the seasonal festivities, during which I saw and enjoyed both Sherlock Holmes and Avatar amid the usual carnage of what is my favourite time of year. I’m definitely a mid-winter person.

I’m currently snowed-in and watching the reports of Britain grinding to a halt (again). I’m afraid to consider how we’ll cope in a real catastrophe.

My work had a good showing among the usual “Best of…” lists, published at the end of 2009.

The Silver Skull (Swords of Albion) appeared in the favourite novels of Locus magazine critic Paul Witcover, SteveReads, Fantasy Book Critic Cindy’s best of 2009 list, and Fantasyliterature.com.

Meanwhile, Age of Misrule was flagged up in the best of 2009 lists of Rob Will Review, Fantasy Book Critic Cindy’s list (again!), and Nethspace.

Thanks to all.

Complimentary copies of World’s End, Darkest Hour and Always Forever (courtesy of Pyr), The Burning Man mass-market paperback and the hardback and tradepaperback editions of Destroyer of Worlds (courtesy of Gollancz) have all recently arrived and are now piled up in the middle of my study. And there’s still Lord of Silence to come from Solaris.

Latest book deliveries

I’m going to need a bigger study.

I come from a long, long line of coal miners (certainly on one side of my family – there’s some strange blood on the other, to be sure). Coal dust is in my veins, as it is in the area where I grew up in the English Midlands. The houses round here used to be black with the coal embedded in the brick from centuries of the stuff being transported from the mines. The landscape was apocalyptic – slag heaps rising to the sky, and palls of smoke from where the seams underground had caught alight.

Against the grim outside world, there was a powerful sense of community. The miners existed alongside death and disability on a daily basis, and lived life to the full whenever they came back into the light. I remember pubs packed with thick-armed, tattooed men, downing pints of bitter and singing raucously, the wives joining their husbands on Saturday nights for singalongs and dancing at the working men’s club, the tall tales, the ghost stories and underground mythologies, and most of all the laughter that bound everyone together.

It’s all gone now. In the early 1980s, the Conservative Government decided to break the back of the troublesome miners’ union and close the pits, including my local ones. The ensuing strike was furious and hard-fought. It tore apart families, villages, friends. Eventually the union lost and the mines were closed. No one round here has forgotten it. Children are told tales of the wicked witch Margaret Thatcher who threw all the men on to the poverty line, brought depression and suicide, left families hungry and killed off the villages. Killed the communities dead.

On the one hand, it’s better round here now. The slag heaps are gone, replaced by green parks and forests. The houses are clean. Work has gradually crept back, but only after years of pain. But that sense of community was gone. The pubs all seem strangely empty to me. Not enough laughter, not enough joy in living. I miss that old world.

A friend of mine, David Bell, has written a book about the strike – The Dirty Thirty – Heroes of the Miners’ Strike (Five Leaves). It celebrates the struggle of the thirty Leicestershire miners who showed great courage in standing up for their beliefs and coming out on strike when many around them argued against it.

Dave interviews the surviving members of The Dirty Thirty, and also talks to the womens’ support group. On the blurb, Tony Benn says this book “is of the greatest importance”. You can order it directly from Dave and get it signed or pick it up from Amazon, Borders and Waterstones.

You can now find me on https://twitter.com/Chadbourn.