Where the Story Began

Why I Wrote Historical Novel Series – The Poole Legacy

The seed of my first historical novel, Poole of Light, emerged during a period when my family was reflecting on the past. My sister had been researching our family history, tracing lives that stretched from farm labourers in Norfolk and Suffolk to coal miners in the North East, and later to working-class lives in Leeds. She visited graveyards and parishes, recording what she could before it was lost.

When she died at just fifty, her work passed to me – documents, notes, fragments of lives already beginning to fade. Not long after, my mother became seriously ill and also passed away. It was a period that led me to reflect on what is carried forward from one generation to another.

Looking through those records, I became aware of how much had changed within a relatively short span of time. My grandmother worked as a housekeeper in a large house in Leeds; my grandfather was a chauffeur for the same household before becoming a cinema manager. My father, through a combination of ability and circumstance, gained a grammar school place after the war and went on to become a doctor. My mother – also working class – trained as a nurse. Their lives, in turn, shaped the starting point for me and my siblings.

What struck me most was the fragility of that change – how much depended on timing, and the ability to seize an opportunity when it appeared.

These ideas led me to Poole of Light.

Jem’s life unfolds at a moment when the world is shifting beneath his feet. The possibilities available to him are uncertain, shaped by forces both personal and historical. I began with an exploration of how one generation gives way to the next, and how those transitions rarely feel inevitable at the time. If Poole of Light is rooted in a world defined by the emergence – of industry, opportunity, and a new kind of cultural life – the second novel moves into a different landscape.

By the 1960s, the structures that shaped Jem’s world have shifted again, the post-war years bringing a re-evaluation of class and identity. Poole of Honour follows a character navigating expectations and inheritance. For Daniel Poole, the questions are about what it means to live truthfully within a world that is itself in flux. But those shifts were not experienced in the same way by everyone. For some, they introduced tension – between the life one was expected to lead and the life one wanted to claim. This is the space the novel explores.

The Poole Legacy series does not follow a continuous path through time. Each book enters at a distance from the last, stepping into a new moment rather than continuing directly from what came before. Poole of Light closes in the mid-twentieth century. Poole of Honour begins some twenty years later, in a society that appears different on the surface, yet remains connected to what preceded it. The third novel, Poole of Eternity, moves forward again into the closing years of the twentieth century.

These intervals are deliberate. They allow each story to stand within its own time, shaped by its own pressures, while still carrying the imprint of what has come before. The connections are not always direct, but they persist in memory and in the subtle continuities that link one generation to the next. By the time we reach book three, the relationship between past and present becomes more complex – less about inheritance in a traditional sense, and more about what is chosen, what is left behind and what it means to define a life independently.

Taken together, the three novels trace how lives unfold across time – how each generation encounters its own moment of change, and how those moments remain connected in ways both visible and unseen. At its heart, the series is about identity and memory, and how the two interact to shape who we become – our legacy.

Poole of Light is available on Amazon now.

Poole of Honour is available for pre-order.

Poole of Eternity will be released in 2027.