British Author Challenge August 2024: KJ Charles & Winston Churchill

KJ Charles spent twenty years as an editor before leaving publishing to become a full-time writer of queer historical novels. She lives in London with her family.

Many of Charles's short stories are available for free on her website, which also contains links to get her novel The Magpie Lord free from various retailers. https://kjcharleswriter.com/free-reads/

Selected works
A Charm of Magpies series
Lilywhite Boys series
Sins of the Cities series
The Doomsday Books series
Will Darling Adventures series
Spectred Isle
The Henchmen of Zenda
The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal
Band Sinister
A Pocketful of Lies

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, his family's ancestral home. He attended Harrow and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

He joined the army in 1895 and saw action in a number of campaigns, about which he would publish several books. He was a POW during the Boer War, but managed to escape and avoided recapture by stowing away on freight trains.

Churchill decided on a career in politics after leaving the army, and won his first election in 1900. He went on to serve as a Member of Parliament nearly continuously from 1900 until 1964, and would twice serve as Prime Minister.

He was a prolific writer of histories and articles, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.

Churchill died on 24 January 1965 and was given a state funeral.

Selected works
Churchill's The Second World War series
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples series
The World Crisis series
Marlborough: His Life and Times
The River War
Savrola (his only novel)
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria
My African Journey
Lord Randolph Churchill
Painting as a Pastime

Winston S. Churchill's Project Gutenberg page https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1601

>2 amanda4242: The Gathering Storm is a 5 star event.

(If an LT historian can explain why Winston Churchill did not want freedom for India
and why he sunk the French ship, that would be welcome.)

So no one is going into them blind, many of KJ Charles's books contain explicit sex scenes. As far as I can remember they all involve consenting adults, but for those who don't care to read sex scenes I know that Death in the Spires, The Price of Meat, and The Rat-Catcher's Daughter don't have any.

It will be The Grand Alliance by Mr. Churchill for me in August.

>4 amanda4242: Thank you for the heads up, Amanda! Unfortunately my local library does not have any of the titles that you mention.

>5 PaulCranswick: I will be joining you in reading The Grand Alliance, Paul. I love Churchill's WWII series.

>6 alcottacre: Too bad your library doesn't have those. To be clear, her books do have substantial plots so you can skim or skip sex scenes without feeling like you're skipping half the book. If available, try Slippery Creatures or The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen.

Death in the Spires by KJ Charles

This one's quite the page-turner! Unlike Charles's other works it's very light on romantic relationships, but it still has the same wonderfully written characters and attention to historical detail I've come to expect of her writing.

Received via NetGalley.

I finished Churchill's The Grand Alliance yesterday, a re-read for me, and I loved it. I find Churchill to be an excellent writer. I have read his History of the English Speaking Peoples and Second World War series both and greatly enjoyed them.

>8 amanda4242:. I just finished that one today. Very readable.

>10 Kristelh: She is very readable. I've been on a bit of kick lately and have finished the England World series, a pair of country house murder mysteries, and the Will Darling Adventures, a trilogy of pulpy espionage thrillers set in the 1920s.

A Fashionable Indulgence by KJ Charles

I thought a nice Regency romance would be just the thing to cheer me up after reading the first three volumes of Barefoot Gen, and then the Peterloo Massacre occurs halfway through. *sigh* Anyway, I did like it and I do appreciate when a historical novel treats history as more than just decoration.

London to Ladysmith via Pretoria by Winston Churchill

This is not the book to read if you know next to nothing about the Boer War as Churchill assumes his readers are already familiar with the conflict, but it is incredibly well written. I had always assumed that Churchill's Nobel was awarded for reasons other than literary merit, but I am happy to find that I was wrong in my thinking.

The September thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/362975