Author Michael Dean – book signings and talk in Colchester and Chelmsford

Michael Dean, author of The Crooked Cross (reviewed here in 2009), will be signing copies of his new novel, Thorn, at Waterstones in Chelmsford on Saturday 17 September 2011 12 noon – 2 pm.

Michael will also be giving a talk about the book and signing copies at Colchester Library on Saturday 24 September 2011, 11 am – 12 noon.

Thorn is published by Bluemoose Books, ISBN 9780956687647. It’s a historical novel set in mid-17th-century Amsterdam, and featuring the philosopher Spinoza and the artist Rembrandt.

Here’s the blurb:

THORN is a Rabelaisian tour through Amsterdam in the mid-17th Century and very, very funny.

In 1656, at the height of The Dutch Golden Age, two giants of European culture meet: philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a Jew of Portuguese descent, and Rembrandt van Rijn, the greatest Dutch Master, find themselves inextricably linked through a failed mercantile venture and membership of the freethinking ‘Waterlanders’ which, in challenging the Calvinist doctrine of the day, pits them against the authorities in Amsterdam.

I’ve read THORN and I think it’s an astonishing book; very powerful, exciting, disturbing and also very funny. It is true to the ideas of its great protagonists Spinoza and Rembrandt and makes the parallel that their lives were made almost impossible because they both sought the truth. It’s a powerful, shocking and moving story of religious intolerance and, as such, more relevant today than it might appear on the surface. DAVID NOBBS

So if you're in the Chelmsford or Colchester area of Essex, UK, over the next couple of weekends, you may like to go along. I expect to review Thorn here in due course (I have a copy on order but it hasn't arrived yet).