CLIO GRAY
Stumblestone
1839. Tumultuous times in Albania, Serbia & Croatia as they fight to free themselves from the Habsburgs & the Ottomans.
Enter the Pfiffmaklers, a travelling theatre troupe, who find the single survivor of a massacre who needs their help. Freely given by some of them, if not by all.
A saint soon to be laid to rest in Ravenna.
A bull race about to begin in a far flung village in the Italian mountains, where Tosk Albanians have been settled for hundreds of years.
Pfiffmaklers caught up in the maelstrom of a complicated skein of politics not their own.
Pfiffmaklers soon fighting for their own survival & that of the child they have rescued...
A recent book by Clio Gray, who has set the historical novel on a new course.
Published by Sparsile Books, June 2022
Here's a couple of trailers to watch
Stumblestone - an extract
1 The Border of Albania and Montenegro, Spring 1839
Down the wide street the company came, newly whitewashed walls a grimy pink from the ox-blood used to fix the paint. They passed between the fig trees growing on either side of the promenade, gnarled roots coiled about their bases like thick brown snakes, palmate leaves covered with fine red dust blown in from the south. A quiet buzzing of fig wasps crawling through tiny holes at each fruit’s end to reach the recumbent flowers within, lines of ants running up and down garnering the sugary juice exuded from those tiny doors.
A peaceful scene, it might have seemed, unless you’d gone inside the cottages, found each one emptied of its inhabitants, signs of hurried departure that might have troubled you: saucepans of soup sitting untouched on home-hewn tables, slices of dark bread hardening in the noonday sun, cauldrons hissing and spitting as the last of the water inside them evaporates on feeble fires left to die.
Just gone twelve, according to the sundial you would have seen if you’d progressed further through the village, reached the patch of grass that once passed for a drying green, a sundial etched with Persian markings signalling the hours and minutes of the day.
You might have wondered how such an oddity had ended up in a backwater like this, a village on the edge of nowhere, tipping from the mountains into the sea somewhere between Albania and Montenegro; a village that had no name as far as any cartographer knew; a village that began and ended with its one wide street, and the green with the singular sundial at its centre.
You might have wondered about its history, only by the time you’d got to the green you’d have been so appalled by what you saw all thoughts of history and sundials would have gone out of your head, for you’d have seen the entire occupancy of the village scrummaged up as one—a heap of bodies piled ready for the burning; each one dispatched by a bullet to head or heart, or hacked by dagger and billhook. All thirty-seven of them, presumably all harvesters of figs or the fish they pulled from the waters of the sea lapping a few hundred yards away on the westerly side of the street. And only one of them alive.
The thirty-eighth.
A child of maybe five or six, who was crawling her way unseen out of the heap of her dead relatives.