Who Was Nightshade?

It is summer 1963, the era of The Beatles and the first James Bond movies. Youth culture is taking over, but the shadows of the Second World War and its demon offspring, the Cold War, still loom, particularly for the older generation. Nowhere is immune to the mood of paranoia, not even the tiny east Hertfordshire village of Fordham Market, where skullduggery, with its roots in both conflicts, is afoot. Through a series of unexpected fatalities, Richard Warren, a well-educated, gay man in his mid-thirties, has inherited not only The Priory, his parents' impressive pile in Fordham Market, but also Wyvern Hall, his uncle's neighbouring, slightly more ramshackle, estate. The only problem is that Richard is broke and his dead relatives seem only to have bequeathed him debt. His old college friend Tony Smallwood offers to help him out of this predicament. But, unknown to Warren, Smallwood is an agent working for the Soviet Union.

This is Eamonn Vincent's first novel. He has previously published Me Neither, a memoir of the Seventies and Eighties and two volumes of poetry Only More So and Even More So, all available from Arbuthnot Books. His new novel Event/Horizon set in Cambridge in the 1970s is scheduled for publication by Arbuthnot in May 2022.

Buy Who Was Nightshade? on Amazon.

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Event/Horizon

Event/Horizon is a postwar coming-of-age story, in a broadly comic mode, but touching on darker aspects of the period, as well as on love, loss, and the pains of growing up. Set in Cambridge in 1974, it interweaves aperçus of academic life with those of the local poetry scene, theatre life, and the era’s counter-culture, — rock music, drugs, and casual sex — with all of which its hero, would-be poet Steve Percival, finds himself having to grapple, in his quest for love, enlightenment and artistic fulfilment. Apart from Event/Horizon Eamonn Vincent has published a memoir of the 1970s and 1980s Me Neither , two volumes of poetry Only More So and Even More So and more recently Who Was Nightshade? , a comic spy thriller set in the 1960s. All titles are available from Arbuthnot Books. Buy Event/Horizon on Amazon.

Eamonn Vincent's books published by Arbuthnot Books

When I published my memoir ' Me Neither ' in 2018 I started a blog in the hope of drawing attention to it. Ha! As if. Even then no one wanted yet another blog or website or tweets about your latest book. The focus had already moved on to Instagram and Pinterest, both studiously averse to textual matter. Now even those sites are old hat and all the action has moved to TikTok and, for the purposes of promoting books, to its offshoot BookTok. Stranger things have been known to happen, but somehow I doubt that Gen Z influencers are on the whole enthusing about Boomer memoirs devoted to the world of work in the 1970s and 1980s. After a few posts I abandoned the blog and let my little book make its own way through the world. In the absence of any publicity or reviews in the public prints, sales were distinctly modest. I was not surprised, but it was hard not to feel a little disheartened. Perhaps memoir was not my forte. What about writing a novel instead? Four years later I seem ...

Eamonn Vincent

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