Archimimus by Clio Gray

Val Penny ♦ October 16, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

Urbane Books has a marvellous new novel coming out by Clio Gray and the author has arranged a blog tour with Love Books Group and has agreed to visit me today. I am delighted. You can follow the full tour here:

The Blurb

Lukitt Bachman is waiting in his Lanterne de Mortes, a Tower of the Dead, in the middle of a cemetery. He’s had a complicated life: son of a Herrnhuter Brother thrown out of his sect; help-meet to a pastor; sailor; fisherman; boar-hunter; and student and lecturer, exploring the varied histories of the Knights Teutonic and the bone-chapels their descendants left behind them. He has become an assassin and a murderer, learned the terrible highs and lows of friendships made and lost, and is awaiting now his last remaining friend to set him free so he can put right past wrongs. As Lukitt is let loose on a world gone mad, can this avenging angel finally find solace for his soul?

The Author

Clio is a British author, born in Yorkshire, spent her later childhood in Devon before returning to Yorkshire to go to university. For the last twenty five years she has lived in the Scottish Highlands where she intends to remain. She eschewed the usual route of marriage, mortgage, children, and instead spent her working life in libraries, filling her home with books and sharing that home with dogs. She began writing for personal amusement in the late nineties, then began entering short story competitions, getting short listed and then winning, which led directly to a publication deal with Headline. Her book, The Anatomist’s Dream, was nominated for the Man Booker 2015 and long listed for the Bailey’s Prize in 2016. Clio has always been encouraging towards emergent writers, and founded HISSAC (The Highlands and Islands Short Story Association) in 2004 precisely to further that aim, providing feedback on short listed stories and mentoring first time novelists, not a few of whom have gone on to be published themselves. Clio published the critically acclaimed Scottish Mysteries trilogy with Urbane Publications and Archimimus is her new historical thriller for 2019.

The Excerpt

Lukitt Habakkuk Bachmann.

A complicated name. A complicated life.

A complicated beginning.

Father: Nethanel, migrant worker, member of the Herrnhuter Brethren who were a little too protestant for the Protestants, exiled from their origins in Saxony; some migrating as far as Greenland and the West Indies; others, like Nethanel’s clan, settling closer to home by the Voralberg Mountains in Austria.

Mother: Trudl, farmer’s daughter, same farm on which Nethanel turned up one summer: fruit-picker, weed-hoer, vegetable-cutter, tattie-hoiker, hay-scyther.

Neither noticing each other – unpretty peasants working side by side with Trudl’s brothers and Nethanel’s Brethren – until Trudl faints in the milling barn from the heat, from the dust that has clogged up nostrils and throat, when Nethanel puts his lips to hers and breathes her back to life.

Stolen moments then, bodies uncomfortably aware of each other, sunny autumn evenings twining themselves together in the laundry pool, on its dappled green banks.

Unforeseen pregnancy, hasty marriage.

Trudl’s father throwing them both out on their ears.

Herrnhuter Elders more forgiving, until Trudl’s swollen belly could not be hidden and sums were made, behaviours condemned. Elder Zebediah calling Nethanel a fool and his new wife a whore, causing them to leave the Herrnhuter.