Books take a long time, right! There can be years between them, and when they come along, they don’t usually follow one another like London buses. But hang on! They do for David N. Martin and his tiny little imprint, ‘Forged Truth Publishing’.
First, in mid-July, there was ‘Blight and Happiness‘, David N. Martin’s ‘best of…’ collection of short stories. Spanning his thirty years as a published writer, his stories take us from the historical horrors of Ireland’s potato blight to the future of AI. The anthology features winners of the Words-with-Jam short story prize, as well as the regional sections of the Aurora Prize, the H.E. Bates Centennial Short Story Prize and a host of other prizes:
Taster stories from the anthology can be found on the Forged Truth website, including the lead story ‘Blight’, a moving tale of survival during the Irish potato famine in 1848. The book can be purchased now on Amazon, following this link.
Hot on the heels of that little gem, at the end of July, came ‘The Modern Type‘, David N. Martin’s sequel to the award winning ‘The Typewriterists’. The novel follows the Havershalls’ industrial empire as the Second World War ends, women battle for their place in the workforce, rationing and poverty worsen and bankrupt Britain dreams of a Welfare State it can’t really afford. This is the era in which immigration from the Commonwealth begins, so there’s a lot going on and that’s why it’s almost 500 pages long. Check it out here.
Quite a statement of intent! Here we see the exhausted author, receiving the first batch of author copies.
When asked about his influences, David highlighted the profound influence of Leicester Writers’ Club on his work. ‘I come from a long way away on a Thursday night,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked out that, over the years, I could have driven around the world more than once on the miles I’ve covered just getting to meetings. I’ve always thought it was worth it.’
leicesterwritersclub.com 