Books by Kevin Walker

A long-awaited set of traditional tales focusing solely on the queer community, showing princesses can fall in love with lady bards, warriors with their noblemen, and that one born a prince may become the most wonderful queen

For most people wandering through the beautiful landscape of the Brecon Beacons is pleasure enough, but sooner or later you may ask yourself, what is that little bird or flower that you see on most of your walks?

This book describes an invariant, l, of oriented rational homology 3-spheres which is a generalization of work of Andrew Casson in the integer homology sphere case. Let R(X) denote the space of conjugacy classes of representations of p(X) into SU(2). Let (W,W,F) be a Heegaard splitting of a rational homology sphere M. Then l(M) is declared to be an appropriately defined intersection number of R(W) and R(W) inside R(F). The definition of this intersection number is a delicate task, as the spaces involved have singularities. A formula describing how l transforms under Dehn surgery is proved. The formula involves Alexander polynomials and Dedekind sums, and can be used to give a rather elementary proof of the existence of l. It is also shown that when M is a Z-homology sphere, l(M) determines the Rochlin invariant of M.

Kevin sums up his approach to navigation as follows: "Successful navigation should be simple and straightforward, and when done correctly, it will enhance the pleasure you get from the outdoors, not detract from it." His book reflects this view and is a concise and practical explanation of how to find your way in mountains and moorland