CHRISTENDOM | BOOK GIVEAWAY | TINY PEEK OF ESSEX DOGS 2

Book giveaway for subscribers only. And book peek is a *really* tiny peek, but still

One of the best things about my job* is that people send me free books. Sometimes they email first. But more often, Colin the postman knocks, and hands me a heavy jiffy bag, containing a book I did not order or solicit.

This week the book was Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, by Peter Heather. This one was solicited. I am reviewing the book for a newspaper and - call me old-fashioned - I like to read it before I do that.

So the first jiffy bag that turned up contained a 'proof’ edition, with Penguin Books’ signature, orange-and-white, generic proof cover. Every evening I have been absorbed in this, scrawling all over it with my multicoloured biro as I get my thoughts in order ahead of filing the review.

I have dozens of proofs like this, accumulated over the years, and they usually still serve as my reference copy of the work.

Proofs almost always come through ‘uncorrected’ (i.e. before the author has had the chance to make their small and final amends and improvements to the text), and without an index. But once I’ve annotated them for review, I’ve usually created my own index of interesting points, with page references, on the blank pages at the front of the book. On balance, that makes them more useful to me than a clean, indexed hardback.

Anyway. I said that the ‘first’ jiffy bag that turned up this week contained the review copy. The second - and third - both contained finished editions. It’s a fine, heavy, beautifully presented book. Quite why I was sent two of them I’m not sure. But we’ll come back to that, because I’m going to give one of them away to a subscriber to this Substack. More on that shortly.

In the meantime, without pre-empting my review, Christendom is a fascinating study of the emergence of the ‘Christian’ world in the Middle Ages. I’ve read several of Peter Heather’s books over the years. He has a rare gift for communicating complex, fragmentary and partial evidence, especially from late Antiquity/the early Middle Ages, in a clear and comprehensible way.

Here, his thesis is that medieval Christianity was far from a done deal from the outset, and the form it took was the somewhat random output of a branch chain of historical pivot points. Or to put it another way: Christendom was never inevitable and it could have looked very different.

If you want to know more, you can read my review in a couple of weeks, and/or read the book itself. To which end, I’m going to give away one of my finished hardback editions. If you’d like to win it, please just write ‘GIVE ME THE DAMN BOOK’ in the comments below.

I’ve restricted access to the comments to paid subscribers to this Substack. So if you’d like to enter, you’ll need to sign up to be one of those. Frankly, this is a two-tier system, and there are some perks to flying business class.

Finally, if you’re particularly keen-eyed, you’ll see in the picture above a glimpse of my own work in progress. This is the first draft of Wolf Moon, the sequel to my novel Essex Dogs. I’ll leave you to guess what’s going on so far, which characters are back, and just how much blaspheming Scotsman and the earl of Northampton have got through so far.

More than one reader has already suggested that Northampton needs his own spin-off series. Better Call Saul-style. Well. That’s a thought for the future, by God’s drooping pintle.

Have a good weekend. I’ll see you on the flip.

Dan x

*I mean, is it a job? I sometimes wonder.