Books published by Cloud Ink Press Ltd

A stranger is discovered dead in the woods beside Ashly House. The unusual stone and threatening letter found with the body opens up a mystery for Pamela, Lady Scawton.  The stone’s colour-changing property is at the heart of the story and takes the characters on a voyage to discover how past events are intertwined with the present.‘The Alexandrite’ is a novel set in both England and New Zealand. The story is contemporary but as it involves family secrets, there are flashbacks to historical scenes which link the story throughout the 20th century. The trail leads from World War 1 to the present day and from an English country village to New Zealand farmland. As the story unravels, a history of class conflicts and social change determines how the characters face the future.

'A Splendid Sin' is a love story. It is fiction based on fact.It describes the love of an older man for a younger man and how this love helps create a great work of art, 'The Last Judgement' which stands on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. It is also the story of genius expressed in artworks breaking boundaries and pushing art into a new form (Mannerism).The forbidden, intense Renaissance same-sex romance takes place under the noses of a powerful Vatican elite headed by the Pope. One man is an adoring muse of the artist and the other, the artist Michelangelo, can only see the beneficence of God in the beauty of his muse. The concept of active same sex love was condemned by Church teaching, much like today.The genius is a forward thinker, he expresses his innermost feelings in the art forms he creates, mostly unconsciously, but the artworks reveal his soul.  His admiration of the perfect human male form and the expression of his sexuality causes him to be conflicted and tortured, yet it is part of his artistic soul in which he loses himself to create. He is a lone genius tortured by his own piety as he breaks rules concerning art and the society he lives in.This creates jealousy, disturbance, paranoia, vindictiveness and betrayal by those who wish to bring Michelangelo down. Many of those attached to the Vatican can only see his art as lewd. His relationship with Tommaso de Cavalieri is an expression of all these elements and through the progression of this story he changes until his soul is quietened and he loses himself, not in the love of Tommaso, but in the love for his faith.  

"I'll never go back," she said. "Never."Sandra McLeod arrived in New Zealand as a child, with her British family. It was 1954. But the family's hopes for a new and better life faltered in the raw timber town and at sixteen Sandra fled. All she took with her were numbness and denial. Fifteen years later, a letter arrives and Sandra, now a successful real estate agent, knows she must go back. Back to her mother's vacant eyes and the secrets of the McLeod family. Back to unpick her past and to learn about loss, grief, mothering - and perhaps a chance of finding home. Set in Kawerau, a small town on the volcanic plateau, this poignant novel explores the cost of migration and what it means to find deep connection with place.