16/06/2026
After years of work, I'm proud to share that my two books are now coming out to the world.
It began with my own DNA. When I had my whole genome sequenced, it connected me directly to my Pictish ancestors six thousand years ago— the people of the far north of Scotland — and I felt compelled to tell their story. What started as a PhD thesis became, when ill health forced me to set it down and take it up again in a different form, two related books.
The first, The Liminal Picts: Faeries, Children and Silver, makes an argument I couldn't stop chasing: that the "fairy folk" of British and Irish legend were never invented. They are the remembered shadow of a real people — small, hidden, living half-glimpsed in chambers beneath the earth — who were then preyed upon. From the ninth century, Viking raiders carried Pictish children across the Pentland Firth and out across the North Atlantic: into slavery in Iceland, and on to the silver-rich courts of Baghdad and Córdoba. I've traced that trade through archaeology, buried silver hoards, the Norse and Arabic sources, and the genetic record now held in Iceland's DNA — where sixty-two percent of the founding maternal line still traces back to Scotland and Ireland.
The companion volume, Captives to the Catastrophe, follows the same indefatigable little people surrounded by enemies and at the mercy of the elements.
Together they are the story of my forebears — and of how much can still be remembered, even when the written record stayed silent.
Both will soon be available now on Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle. If you read them, I'd love to know what you think — and a share would mean a great deal when I launch.
