Welcome back to theThe Chronicle! As always we are delighted to share our news about historical fiction and non-fiction reads publishing across Head of Zeus' imprints.

It's a bumper month for us in terms of historical publishing. We have paperback editions of Elodie Harper's The Temple of Fortuna and Dan Jones' Wolves of Winter as well as Tim Hodkinson's Sword of the War God and Eleni Kyriacou's The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou. We're also thrilled to show off new non-fiction from Myles Dungan, Will Hutton and Stephen Talty.

We're also excited to look ahead to new historical reads coming later in the year from Dan Jones and Matthew Harffy.

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Land Is All That Matters

By Myles Dungan

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe everyone lived ‘off the land’ in one way or another. In Ireland, however, almost everyone lived ‘on the land’ as well. Land was vital.

In this epic narrative, Myles Dungan explores two hundred years of the land wars that shaped Irish history, from the ruinous famine of 1741 to the eve of World War Two.

Land Is All That Matters is a sweeping story that captures both the human experience and the global relationships at the heart of Irish history.

Read a snippet from the introduction...

There is our history. Then there are the tales we tell about ourselves.

‘Held in fee simple’ – it’s a phrase whose roots lie in feudal times, well-known in the legal profession, and perhaps vaguely familiar to anyone who has ever bought a house or a farm. But that modest legal concept encapsulated the aspirations of generations of Irish peasants. They killed, burned, slashed, scalded, carded, boycotted and were hanged, beaten and jailed for the entitlement to ‘fee simple’, the right to possess, enjoy and bestow their own real estate. In so doing, they turned on their equally penniless neighbours in envious rage far more often than they ever tweaked the noses of their overlords.

Landlord and tenant relations in Ireland were never entirely unproblematic, though perhaps they were not always as fraught as those between the fourteenth-century magnate John de Bermingham (conqueror of Edward Bruce at Faughart in 1318) and his Louth tenantry. In what has become known as the Braganstown massacre, in 1329 they attacked him within the curtilage of his own manor, ‘not wishing that he should rule over them’, and hacked to death more than 150 members of the de Bermingham family and his retinue of, clearly, not very effective mercenary defenders. The body count of subsequent landlord/tenants disputes was mercifully lower, though the animosity and the disinclination to submit to authority was often of a similar magnitude.

The struggle for the ownership of Ireland’s land encompassed two major famines; a host of minor subsistence crises (one estimate puts this at more than twenty); and a plethora of localised and nationwide insurrections.

Here's Dan Jones to introduce his upcoming biography.