Every few months I set aside the novelist’s desk and return to the reader’s chair. These are six books I return to, recommend without hesitation, or simply cannot stop thinking about. They span centuries, continents, and registers—Gothic Louisiana, medieval Cornwall, the towers of Notre-Dame, Revolutionary France, the streets of Salvador da Bahia—but they share the […]
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FEB 2026 Literary Titan Gold Book Award Winner Asterios and the Labyrinth follows Prince Asterios of Knossos as his father dies, political rivals rise against him, foreign powers threaten the island, and love pulls him in directions that the laws of his world barely allow. The story blends palace intrigue, war, prophecy, and a passionate
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A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy by Edmond Thornfield is an adult historical fantasy set primarily in fifteenth-century Cortona, Italy, a period defined by religious authority, political tension, and unspoken desire. The novel follows the intertwined lives caught between duty and longing, most notably Lorenzo di Ranieri, a Florentine soldier returning to
There are books one reads, and books one lives. The ten gathered here belong to the second category. I have returned to each of them more than once—some many times—not always for study, not always with a writer’s analytical eye, but often simply for the comfort of returning to a world that once held me
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AS THE EPICENTER OF RADICAL HUMANISM AND ARTISTIC ENLIGHTENMENT, FLORENCE BECAME THE PARAMOUNT CRUCIBLE OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. Independent thinkers broke free from the constraints of the preceding millennium. Against this backdrop, the following tale gives voice to the long-suppressed desires and identities of those who suffered the dominant assumption that heterosexuality is the default and
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Edmond Thornfield’s novel, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos), is a reimagined, action-packed mythological and historical story, set in ancient Krete (Crete) during the period of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization. When King Minos dies, his son Asterios succeeds him as the ruler of the Kingdom of Labrys. Prince Phaistos of Archanes is commander-in-chief
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Every novelist has a private library of books that made their own work possible—not sources to be cited or influences to be acknowledged in an author’s note, but companions in the deeper sense: books that showed what historical fiction could do when it refused to compromise, when it trusted its readers with difficulty and moral
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