Category: Behind the Book

Farewell to Russia is a book about independence. It contains what are essentially 15 coming-of-age stories, charting the journeys of the countries that were born from the ashes of the USSR in 1991.

I spent a large part of the mid-2010s engaging in arguments about independence. In 2014, it was Scotland and the Donbas republics; the subsequent years saw Greece’s aborted attempt to leave the Euro, followed by our own EU vote in Britain. In 2017 Catalonia made its bid to go it alone, while 2019 saw the twilight hours of democratic Hong Kong.

I was based in Beijing for the latter events and was surprised to find even the most liberal Chinese describing the peaceful protests of Hong Kongers as acts of dangerous extremism, playing with fire by threatening to split the country.

Before Beijing I had been based in Moscow, and I would often discuss Russia with my Chinese friends. In China, the breakup of the USSR is viewed as a tragedy, the general consensus being that the Russian communists had been weak in letting their country collapse. In the words of Xi Jinping, “no-one was man enough to stand up and resist”.

So, was the breakup of the USSR a good thing? I wanted to write a book about that one day.

False Starts

Despite my chequered travel history, I should probably note here that I am not a spy. Even so, bad things to tend to happen to His Majesty’s foes if I stay in their countries long enough.

In China it was Covid. As I joined the stampede out of the country in January 2020, it struck me that this would be an excellent time to begin the post-Soviet project that had been forming in the back of my mind. I would whizz round the former USSR in 2020, writing it up in 2021 in time for the 30^th anniversary of independence.

But the pandemic saw to it that I only made it as far as Poland. Unable to do any actual travelling, I scaled down my ambitions and set about writing a novel set in Moscow instead.

I returned to Russia in February 2022, wanting to add the final flourishes to the novel before beginning the USSR project. But, sure enough, another bad thing happened. Within three weeks of my arrival, Russia had invaded Ukraine.

I’ve spent parts of this war in both Moscow and Kyiv. In each I felt the same suffocating sense of paranoia. Life seemingly went on as normal, but behind the veneer of your average weekday was the ever-present threat that your world could collapse at any moment.

In Moscow it was the psychological pressure that ratcheted up. Flights abroad started to get cancelled, credit cards stopped working, and we half-jokingly voiced our fears that the KGB might snatch foreigners from their beds in the middle of the night. Then an American basketball player was arrested on spurious charges of drug possession at Moscow airport. Suddenly that joke wasn’t funny anymore.

I flew to Yerevan and felt an almost physical sense of relief upon being out of Russia. In my exuberance, I proceeded to get immediately blottoed in a brilliant establishment called Beatles Pub. This ended predictably well. I came back to the hotel and cracked my head open after tripping over my own suitcase.

As I recuperated, I realised that inadvertently, the book project had already begun. What with a war and a hospital visit, I grimly observed that I had a chapter or so in the bag. All that remained was the small matter of going to thirteen more countries, many of which were crackpot dictatorships, and one of which was in the midst of an invasion.

The Research

The travel practicalities generally boiled down to three things: 1) funding, 2) sources 3) route planning.

The first was reasonably simple. I was teaching Chinese students on most days. This was practical, although it did rather limit the more adventurous travel options. With students expecting regular classes, a journey over the Caspian Sea, a trek through the Pamir mountains or a sortie to the Donbas frontlines would have been difficult to justify to an ambitious Chinese mother who wants her son to pass his IELTS exam. However, teaching did provide me with time, I didn’t need to be back for anything and so could go about my intelligence gathering in a reasonably unhurried manner.

But how to gather that intelligence? How do you canvass local opinion when you’re not particularly well-connected?

There are always some trusty standbys: hitchhiking; haircuts; market-stall holders; passengers on long-distance trains, and, of course, bars. The fact that this book has been described by one critic as “a remarkable feat of drinking”, is testament to how seriously I took this research.

Cut-price guided tours at museums and running clubs were another unexpected boon. I made a particular effort to get outside each country’s capital, where the people were friendlier and the experience of independence was often radically different. All of the above usually provided a decent mosaic from which to work.

Certain people are overrepresented in the book – English and Russian speakers, of course – but also those prepared to talk to a foreign stranger, or stop their car to give him a lift, or those who respond to unsolicited messages asking for an interview. Generous people, in other words.

And I’m glad that the generous are well-represented. Having read so many books about the USSR, I find that there’s often a lot of portentousness, a lot of bullets in the back of the head, and the sense of a people battered this way and that by the great forces of history. What many miss are the ordinary individuals: hardworking, hard-partying and hilariously droll, with huge hearts and dark, sledgehammer wit.

The Writing

There are many books on how to write so I won’t waste too much time reflecting on it. To the extent that anything “worked” for me, every distraction has to go: social media; your love interests; your alcohol intake; your joy. Guard your time jealously. Meal prep for the week. Go running to clear your head.

If you’re still to find an agent or publisher, don’t read the work of your peers. Any positive ideas that you might get from them will be more than offset by the raging jealousy.

In London, the British Library and the National Archives at Kew are wonderful free places to write. There were good days when I would come home with a warm glow inside. But for the most part it is miserable and lonely. Aspiring authors be warned: you will get rejected, and you will suffer.

What worked for me was embracing the suffering. Seeing the work as an enormous, ugly lump of rock that you have to slowly chisel to perfection.

For non-fiction writers – get in touch with others in the field and interview them for the book. As a debut author, I found this intimidating at first, but many experts enjoyed the fact I got in touch. Prepare well for these calls, they’ll not only give you ideas to improve your work, they’ll provide an enormous release when you realise that others share your interest.

Coming through the process of writing a book, you’ll find that you have more empathy; you’ll be slower to criticise other artists’ work; you’ll spend more money on books, independent films and other creative endeavours; you’ll likely help out people in the same position; and you’ll be a stronger person for not having given up.

Farewell to Russia is out now, published by Elliott & Thompson.

In 2005, I was finishing up a term as a clerk for the Missouri Court of Appeals. I needed not only a job but a mentor. I learned an older attorney with an established practice was looking for someone to take over his business. He specialized in probate and estate planning, something I knew little about. But I was throwing out a wide net so I faxed in a resume.

Then I got a phone call.

“This is Rolland Comstock,” the smoke-engraved voice said on the other line. “I see you went to law school in Lawrence, Kansas.”

“That’s right.” I braced myself for the usual abuse I took for going to the historic rival of our state’s flagship institution.

“Tell me, who is the most famous author from there.”

Was this guy for real, I thought. But these kind of weird trivia questions were sort of my thing.

“Well, there’s Langston Hughes but he’s a poet. So I am going to say William Burroughs.” (The legendary beat author moved to the college town in his old age and the place became a Mecca for people like Kurt Cobain and Michael Stipe to visit and pay homage.)

I heard an exhalation of nicotine from the other end. “Yes, yes. That’s very good.”

Thus, started my relationship with Comstock. I learned, quickly, he wasn’t just any lawyer. He was also a renowned book collector who had been featured in “The Washington Post” and “The London Times” for his obsessive efforts. He had built a three-story library onto his home with chandeliers and rolling ladders. Dead authors at the top; living on the first level. He lived with a pack of hybrid wolves who trailed my every move and bit at my fingers.

While I loved the idea of working for him – we would talk about art-house movies rather than cases– the experience was dysfunctional. He was going through a divorce and the dispute over their house consumed his life. Rolland never came to the office so I never received any guidance. Plus, his money went to fueling the lawsuits with his ex-wife with little left to pay employees.

I lasted barely over a year. Rolland was murdered a few months later after I left.

My new firm took over his practice and I ended up getting to know his daughter, Faith. She hired our firm to represent her when she sued her mother in civil court for Rolland’s death. While no criminal charges ever got filed, a jury ended up saying his former wife of 38 years pulled the trigger that killed him.

I would tell the story of this eccentric lawyer and people would say it sounded too crazy to be true. That someone should write a book not only about the murder but about Rolland’s unusual life.

Yes, I would think. Someone should write a book about this.

The book is out now and published by Post Hill Press.

I wrote Timebomb by accident.

On the hundredth anniversary of Henry Moseley‘s death, in 2015, a flurry of history podcasts came out about his life and legacy. Because of my physics degree, I was familiar with the broad strokes: he was a brilliant young British atomic physicist, considered a shoo-in for the Nobel prize for his work on nuclear charge. He volunteered for service in World War One and lost his life to a sniper’s bullet at Gallipoli.

I listened to the podcasts with interest. I’d always been fascinated by Moseley’s tragic story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of conformity to societal expectations, particularly as they relate to gender. Although he could have been infinitely more useful to the war effort as a scientist (for example, his mentor Sir Ernest Rutherford put his skills to work developing anti-submarine acoustic technology), Moseley instead signed on as a soldier, insisting that as an able-bodied man it was his duty to be exposed to the dangers of combat. As a result, perhaps the finest scientific mind of his generation was snuffed out before he reached his 28th birthday.

The podcasts also revealed a fresh detail about Moseley. Just before departing for the war, he had written his mother a letter, saying that he would soon be sending her a scientific notebook, adding “I value it highly”. This notebook, the podcasts told me, had subsequently vanished.

My first thought was that this sounded like the premise of exactly the kind of novel I enjoy reading: an historical mystery with high stakes and the potential for international intrigue and skulduggery. My second thought was that somebody MUST have already written it.

When I discovered that no fictionalised version of Henry Moseley’s life existed, I began to imagine what the plot of such a story would look like. A notebook belonging to a brilliant atomic physicist had gone missing. What secrets might it have contained? Who would have been interested in acquiring these secrets? And how did the notebook disappear?

I kept my wife apprised of the progress of my imaginary novel as the plot gradually took shape in my head. Liz, herself a writer, encouraged me to write the thing, but no, I was only playing with ideas. Writing novels was something that other people did, and anyway, a novel was a huge undertaking. Who has that sort of time?

Several months passed, during which I continued to “play” with the plot of my never-to-be-written novel. I also read up on such diverse topics as conscientious objectors during World War One, the history of policing in the UK, atomic physics, and, oddly enough, whippet racing.

Eventually, it became clear to me that I was no longer simply playing at writing a novel. I’d created a workable outline and done extensive research. All that remained was to begin actually putting words on the page. I sat at my computer, took a deep breath, and started typing.

The journey from blank page to publication has not been a short one. What with writing, researching, and seemingly endless revisions, it has been a much longer road than I’d naively expected when I first started. For me, though, the time and the effort have been worthwhile. I hope that readers of Timebomb will feel the same way.

Timebomb is out now, published by Sharpe Books.

‘A superior historical thriller, which is both a murder mystery and espionage novel…for fans of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr.‘ – Thomas Waugh

It’s working title was HENRY’S BOMB, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Debut Dagger award and for the 2020 “Unhanged Arthur” award for best Canadian unpublished crime manuscript. It was also a finalist for the 2022 Killer Nashville Claymore award in the “Best Thriller” category

Kevin Bartlett was born in Colchester. He lives in Victoria, Canada, with his wife. He has degrees in both history and physics. He has lived in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, working at particle accelerators, an astronomical observatory, and as a scientific fisheries observer.

Timebomb is his first novel.

All God’s Creatures is not a book I intended to write. It’s a prequel to my novel Fox, published in 2016, which at the time seemed complete in itself. Gradually, however, events got the better of me.

Fox was a satirical thriller about urban foxhunting and Chinese spies which proved weirdly prescient, since it involved a mass-surveillance system developed in Beijing and a virus whose spread the government was struggling to control. A minor strand focused on a militant religious movement called All God’s Creatures, which held that animals should be allowed to receive Holy Communion. The disruption it caused allowed the Prime Minister – under pressure from the Beijing government – to threaten the mass closure of churches unless the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced an underground Christian movement in China.

I gave little thought to All God’s Creatures over the next few years. But as the forces of political correctness gathered, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with some of the new movements that were sweeping the world. Suppose the All God’s Creatures creed actually was widely accepted and anyone who disagreed with it was cancelled: how, I wondered, might that come about? So I set to work on the story of Ben Fairweather, the editor of a religious magazine called Cathedral which is taken over by All God’s Creatures. As a result, Ben finds himself thrown into a world of Russian spies, art forgery and murder.

Ben’s experiences were based partly on my own. Like him, I’d worked on magazines turned upside down by mad directives from above. Like him, I’d mourned the death of a dog and speculated on whether animals go to heaven – the inspiration for a Cathedral article which draws the attention of predatory forces. And though, unlike him, I lack the skill to pursue a second career as a nightclub pianist, it’s something I’ve occasionally fantasised about.

In its original form All God’s Creatures was – at 39,000 words – very short: too short.  How could I make it more substantial? As the plot involved a forged painting, I hit on the idea of a back story for it: who had painted it and why. It happened that my wife and I had made several visits to St Ives so that she could study at its art school; while we were there, a local friend mentioned that people in witness-protection schemes were often settled in Cornwall because it was so far from London. So Kevin Murphy, a former gang member who discovers a gift for painting, joined the cast of characters. Weaving his story into the existing narrative was far from easy, but added to the richness of the novel.

Satire, like much of fiction, is a way of taking revenge on an unsatisfactory world, and in writing it I’m spurred on by things that annoy me. The targets in All God’s Creatures include Russian oligarchs, art curators and pretentious language. The novel’s main purpose, however, was to explore the way that fanatics can take reasonable ideas and push them to insane extremes. I hope that readers will find it thought-provoking as well as funny and exciting.

I figured, when I started work on Season, that since I spend so much time watching football, thinking about football, and talking about football, I may as well start writing about it too. I’ve supported Norwich City since I was a boy, and two decades of delight and despair have naturally left me with a vast repository of memories and impressions to draw upon. I’m wary of trite and inflexible ‘rules’ around writing, but there is something to be said for writing what you know, and I know what it means to be a football fan.

Season was not my first attempt at writing a novel. By the time I started on the book which would become my debut, I had already drafted and discarded four or five full-length manuscripts. None of them were good enough to be published, but the process of composing and editing them taught me a lot and made me a more thoughtful writer.

With Season, the first thing I did was settle on a structure. What about a novel, I thought, which takes place over the thirty-eight games of a Premier League season, with a chapter for each match? This formal framework gave me a skeleton around which I could neatly build the narrative, which I wanted to ground in the match-day experiences of football supporters rather than focussing too much on the events of the pitch. I thought writing about two men at different life stages would help me say something about the universality of the fan experience and football’s ability to bridge social gaps, and this led naturally to the unnamed Old Man and Young Man at the heart of the novel and the friendship which develops very slowly between them.

The first draft of Season was very different from the version published by Eye Books in 2025. Season had initially emerged as a short and self-conscious novella, which (I think) did a good job of capturing the mood and the spirit of the terraces but only skimmed the surface of everything else. Thankfully, this draft still had enough about it to win me an Escalator New Writer Fellowship at the National Centre for Writing. As part of the programme, I spent the best part of a year refining the manuscript under the mentorship of the novelist Michael Donkor.

The bones were already there, but Michael’s external perspective helped me get to grips with the guts of the story. I developed the characters, expanded the narrative, and teased out some themes which had previously been lurking just under the surface. But perhaps Michael’s best advice was to do with the book’s title.

I had been going with the clunkier and far less poetic Season Ticket, until Michael suggested I ‘drop the Ticket.’ Sometimes, in football, you know a shot is going in as soon as it leaves the striker’s boot, and this suggestion had the same feeling about it. In that moment, Season was born, and I knew then that I was on to a winner.

Season was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for best Debut Fiction, published by Lightning Books.