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An Evening with James Vella-Bardon on The Sassana Stone: The Hero of Rosclogher

An Evening with James Vella-Bardon

Join us at La Valette Social Centre for an evening with award-winning author James Vella-Bardon, to celebrate the publication of HERO OF ROSCLOGHER, the third instalment of his epic, award-winning, critically acclaimed THE SASSANA STONE PENTALOGY, recently referred to on Goodreads as “THE IRISH SHOGUN”
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JVB’s debut THE SHERIFF’S CATCH is a breakneck, hair-raising thriller which took the literary world by storm upon its UK release in 2018. THE SHERIFF’S CATCH and both its published sequels A REBEL NORTH and HERO OF ROSCLOGHER grab readers by the scruff of the neck and drag them back 500 years, to a heart-pounding time of gore, guts and glory.
In this epic, sprawling tale that eats James Clavell’s ‘Shogun’ for breakfast, the Maltese born-and-bred Spanish Armada castaway Abel de Santiago finds himself shipwrecked in Ireland, where he flees his English captors after stealing an emerald ring of great material and geopolitical value. With the aid of the widowed poet bard Muireann Mac An Bhaird, he must somehow reach the rebel Irish tribes who still resist English oppression, but his heady misadventures have only just begun.
Charismatic Spanish sea captain and Armada castaway Francisco de Cuéllar has hardly been rescued by Santiago and Muireann, when terrible tidings reach the Irish kingdom of Dartry at the start of a winter that is harsh beyond memory.
Queen Elizabeth’s viceroy has left Dublin, leading an army of two thousand strong across Ireland. As one rebel chieftain after another is crushed in his path, the English commander’s destination appears to be Santiago’s hideout in Dartry. The tribe’s sufferings are set to greatly worsen as they are forced to withdraw to the frosty mountains with their herds and belongings. They leave behind them nine Spaniards led by the brash Captain de Cuéllar, sworn to defend the island fort of Rosclogher.
As the viceroy’s army gathers about the tower-house, Santiago must fight a lost cause of his own making. Vile betrayal worsens the odds faced by the defenders, who must choose between fatal surrender and a heroic last stand.
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James Vella-Bardon was born and raised in Malta, an island nation influenced by thousands of years of imperial history – from the Romans to the British – where his passion for exciting and dramatic historical events was formed. After reading law and history at the Universities of both Malta and Sydney, James qualified as a lawyer and completed a PhD on the rights and freedoms of peoples at international law. He emigrated to Sydney in 2007 and turned his hand to novel writing. His debut novel The Sheriff’s Catch (2018), which recounts the adventures of a Spanish Armada castaway in Tudor Ireland, made bestseller lists in Europe and was also named an ‘Outstanding Historical’ by the IAN Book Awards in 2019, while receiving various other international awards and nominations. James was heralded as ‘the new king of historical fiction’ by British newspaper The Scotsman, in their review of his novella Mad King Robin, about Robert the Bruce.

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