Books by John Howlett

'We are strangers who meet in hell,' she'd written to him in her first letter: 'We need hide nothing from one another.' But now that hell has disappeared, it might not be so easy not to hide. A Long Road Home follows the love and brief laughter, the silences and the haunting of a couple returning from the 'Great War' - Harry and Annie who find their old worlds no longer relevant to their experience. They have to create new lives for themselves, first in a Mexico recovering from civil war, then in Italy - where they will witness and experience the rise of fascism and its brutality. For Harry these are also years when conscience and retribution pursue him. For during that Great War he had committed murder: he knew, Annie knew and the Emma Pips also know. Is his old enemy, redcap Ginger, not still hunting him down? Part 2 of 6 in the Harry and Annie Series.

He seemed thinner than Harry remembered, still boyish though he must now be nearly forty: formerly Lieutenant 'Bunny' Andrews, leaning on a walking-stick with his smile and genuine delight at shaking the hand of his one-time Lance-Corporal, Harry Cardwell. Their War To End All Wars had happened long ago. Twenty years later they still lived with its echoes, shadow, loss and nightmare in their minds and bodies. So why and how could they now be meeting as volunteers in another war? 'We are grown men,' said Bunny. 'We should be cultivating our gardens.' When War Came Again is the third volume of six in the Harry and Annie Series which started with Love Of an Unknown Soldier.

Morgan Hunter-Brown is 'Railway Joe', employed by Interpol to investigate smuggling and financial espionage in cold-war Europe. Alone as always at Christmas, he's the agent called up for a chase that will lead him north to Germany, 'home' to London, finally back to his one-time, wartime motherland in Italy. Manipulated by his Contrôlleur and falling in love with every pretty face he sees, every soft voice he hears, Morgan is equally at the mercy of events, enemies and his own emotions......

The book you must read in case it's true Max John believes he has discovered the origin of HIV/AIDS. The old soldiers and the spies know that he has. Once Max is dead they hunt down his girlfriend Tess and the evidence she is carrying - a desperate chase and culling across the continent from New York to Los Angeles in pursuit of anyone who has seen even a tiny part of that evidence - one battered sports bag full of tape and film. Max and his cameraman have been killed in mysterious circumstances, only Tess surviving to honour their memory by finding her way through the tape and film to unravel and tell....... THE STORY THAT CAN NEVER BE TOLD

"e;The whole country is afraid. People favour the armistice and support the Marechal. Do not assume anyone will not betray you. Above all, remember the French now hate the English..."e; It is Christmas 1940, Harry Cardwell and his son Frank escorting downed airmen across Vichy France and fascist Spain to safety in Gibraltar. Harry and Frank will be parachuted back into that confusing triptych of danger and death, Switzerland's borders with Germany, France and Italy... where Harry's wife, Frank's mother, runs a British fifth column from the Rheinsprung and the station buffet in Basel, to gather information, set up escape lines, filter agents into Germany - while alarming mandarins at the Embassy in Berne: 'This Annie Cardwell, she's mature and full of lived-life. She goes back a long way for someone who still looks young and beautiful...'Fourth Volume of Six in Harry and Annie Series

When this book was first published in the 1980's, it was dramatised by BBC Radio. After only one episode, the Thatcher government tried to have it taken off air. The then heads of the BBC decided Maximum Credible Accident was 'factually correct and an essential element in the public debate' - and refused to censor it in any way. 'Imagine concentrating everything that scares you most about a conventional nuclear reactor, speeding it all up and immersing it in liquid that burns in air and explodes on contact with water. Then persuade yourself that nothing will ever go wrong with it: no terrorists, no Chernobyl, no Fukushima ... No Acts of God, no Murphy's Laws can be permitted.' In Maximum Credible Accident the decision about Britain's nuclear future is entrusted to a senior civil servant - Gordon Aylen, Whitehall and Washington determined to sway Aylen's decision -while unknown to him, a prototype Fast Breeder is running wild in Tuscany, beyond human control and beyond reach of any known fail-safe system.

"e;Your wife's been captured - and, I'm afraid, tortured."e; The senior officer across the desk looked up: "e;She was heard to scream. We don't know for how long."e; The officer stood up: "e;I'm very sorry,"e; he said and shook Harry's hand... Harry Cardwell's wife Annie is in the hands of the OVRA, Italian secret police; his youngest son waits alone and vulnerable in Basel, his oldest son is trying to track down Harold Macmillan somewhere in North Africa: one family, like so many in war, scattered across the world and variously in peril... Between them they live the invasion of Sicily and Italy: with the 8th and 5th Armies and the foot-soldiers' slog; with the PoWs and the partisan war; with the desperate heroism everywhere, military and civilian; with the tragic consequences of mistake or betrayal. And all of them all the time inside that endless roulette-wheel of injury, death or survival, most especially at the very end when victory and peace seem within grasp. Book 5 of 6 in the Harry and Annie series.

It is 1945. Victorious London and her country are exhausted; conflict and confusion dominate the ruins of Koln and Berlin, of Italy and fascist Spain; while a ruthless banditry will soon control the secret world in Washington's Foggy Bottom - its tentacles to reach even the Vatican. Family and friends search for Harry Cardwell, alive or dead. Harry's son, Frank pursues justice or revenge for Nuremburg and the Judge Advocate General - but eventually, exhausted, chooses Opera Lirica where the red flag flies in Emilia. Frank, Helen and William with their children and children's children will gather and return for Harry and the new Millennium - to the snows of Puschlav and Alp Grum. The Cold War has divided the World, divides Europe, divides countries, above all divides the Cardwells. This far-reaching novel questions the accepted origins and the conduct of that division, and witnesses in particular the ruthless stranglehold of American power and paranoia on the politics and life of Italy and of Chile.

This book represents the first scholarly gathering together of the long-neglected poetry of the School Inspector, educationalist and philosopher Edmond Holmes (1850 1936). Alongside a generous selection from Holmes's six volumes of poetry there is also a full reproduction of Holmes's essay What is Poetry which served to delineate his thinking on the discipline. Supporting these original works is both a lengthy scholarly introduction and extensive endnotes which serve to locate Holmes's poetry not merely within the context of its time and amongst his own contemporaries but also to make a case for the importance of this body of work in its own right particularly in its promulgation of original and innovative ideas. Holmes's poetry represents a particularly unique combination of traditional verse form coupled with innovative and esoteric subject matter (often drawing upon Eastern Buddhist philosophy as well as Western Romanticism and Pantheism) and so deserves to be more widely recognized as being wholly distinctive within the canon of Victorian and Modern poetry.