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OUT NOW!
Latest Publications
OUT NOW - KATHLEEN'S WAR, my mother's account of living as an Englishwoman in Nazi-occupied Holland, is edited with commentary by me. I have been intending to get it into print for a long time, and now, with the help of graphic designer Penny Jones, it makes a handsome paperback, complete with photographs and map, at £7.99.
ISBN 978-0-9569217-0-3. Available from AMAZON.co.uk
THE DARDANELLES DISASTER – Winston Churchill’s Greatest Failure - appeared in paperback in August 2010. The hardback original appeared, also from Duckworth Overlook, in August 2009 and remains available.
EEL PIE ISLAND, published in October 2009, sold out by February 2010 but was reprinted in April and is still readily available via bookshops and Amazon.
www.franceslincoln.com
Eel Pie Island Launch
Eel Pie Island was launched on Eel Pie Island – where else? – on Wednesday 7 October 2009, the eve of official publication. It was a classic island occasion, with an inconveniently high tide that prevented people from crossing the footbridge, and it was raining heavily. More...
Latest Obituaries
I have recently commemorated Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Dhenin of the RAF, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Julian Oswald of the Royal Navy and Sergeant John McAleese, MM, of the Army's SAS regiment, who broke the siege of the Iranian embassy live on TV. And Germany's mini-Murdoch, Leo Kirch (Sky Deutschland etc.) as a change of diet in between.
I had heard nothing for four months after publishing the obituary of Lachhiman Gurung, a Gurkha VC, at Christmas. I thought The Guardian had forgotten me or else that the Grim Reaper was slacking. But my triumphant return to the obit pages was marked by a piece on another Gurkha VC, Tul Bahadur Pun, four months later.
At the same time a piece appeared that I had written for stock as long ago as 1998, on Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach, the man who persuaded Thatcher to send a naval task force to the Falklands. He thereby saved her political bacon - but was not awarded a gong because he was publicly attacking government plans to reduce the fleet by a third at the time. His boss, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin, was made a Knight of the Garter and a peer - he was in New Zealand at the time of the decision and subsequent despatch of the task force! How mean was our Maggie...
More obituaries and articles can be found at www.guardian.co.uk/profile/dan-van-der-vat.
Author's Whinge
WITH TWO EXCEPTIONS I am not a bestselling author, but I have published fourteen books. They have gone into fourteen languages. Twelve have been published in the USA. Three have won literary accolades. The reviews, as you may have seen on this site (there are plenty of others!), have been positive on the whole. So Dan van der Vat is no Dan Brown, but rather a “mid-list” author who has a solid track record, asks little from a publisher (and gets decidedly less). More...