Overview — Historical Fantasy, Epic Love Story, Roman Britannia
Life is Good.
Immortal by pure mischance, Nico has lived a carefree life for hundreds of years, mastering skills, moving on before anyone notices he doesn’t age. Blacksmith, sailor, healer. He discovers powers that reach well beyond those of any mortal. Among his many abilities, he can vanish across countries in a single breath.
An Immortal in Roman Britannia, AD 325
Nico is never happier than when he is afloat. It is a passion above all others, satisfying something deep in his soul. As his boat approaches a riverbank in Roman Britannia, AD 325, Nico sees Elly. Their minds open to one another, two inner worlds suddenly and completely revealed. He sees a nature that finds joy even in the darkest times. She witnesses the exact moment his love for her begins.
If only she were immortal.
He already knows how it will end. He has seen death. He cannot bear to see this one. Elly will age. She will die. And he will remain, carrying the memory of her for eternity. Alone. The thought weighs on him, a secret obsession that drives a search for answers, determined to give Elly the one thing science and philosophy have never achieved. Immortality. He has one fragile thread of hope, and he will follow it wherever it leads.
Elly grew up on her father’s Roman estate, more at home scaling boat rigging than sitting indoors. Quick-witted and warm, she has a rich laugh that makes people feel the sun has come out.
Elly met Prim when young and they became inseparable. Almond-eyed from her Egyptian heritage, Prim has always been frank about desire, treating it as one of life’s pleasures, while waiting patiently for love to find her. She saw Nico first. His appearance was her idea of the perfect man, but it was Elly he locked eyes with.
They have shared everything since they were girls — their lives, their laughter, their secrets, and now their love for the same man. What the three find together is tender and joyful, a golden summer under canvas, travelling the roads of Roman Britannia, with a happiness so complete it aches.
A wolf and a horse have strong opinions. She is fiercely loyal and deeply disdainful in equal measure. He once charged a god in its full terrible power and considers himself a hero — though his eyes were shut at the time.
A story that takes its time, lets its people breathe, and gives you space to truly live in their world
From Roman Britannia to Ancient Greece
The Mediterranean calls. On a Greek island, in a villa carved from white rock above a private cove, a life takes shape that none of them dared imagine. Limestone cliffs, shimmering water, and Ithaca sitting on the horizon like a legend made solid. They have a roguish fisherman neighbour and a household that grows around them like something living. Nico believes that, after centuries of living, this may be the best time of his life.
And yet.
When those he loves are threatened, Nico’s rage shatters reality, and he is hurled through the breach into realms no living soul should enter. He has burned in Tartarus, in torment no mortal could survive. Sometimes Elly is taken with him into the dark.
A sword cuts Elly’s arm. In crisis they become one being, and she tastes what it means to be more than human. She wants to roar with primal glory. She still does. Her ecstasy is absolute. That flood of immortal power pulls her into a realm built from her own fears, where the faces of those she loves are weapons designed to break her.
She is not easily broken.
Life, Elly knows, does not wait for wounds to heal. There is laughter on the terrace, philosophical discussion that runs late into the night, a household that has grown into something that feels like family. There are nights under sail when the world falls quiet and the stars seem close enough to touch. Everything Elly has ever wanted surrounds her.
It is not enough.
This is a story about the profound joy of an ordinary life, extraordinarily lived.
Vanishing Age captures one beautiful moment in an eternal existence. A trilogy where the ancient and the impossible meet romance, fantasy and the good life.
Meet Nico, Elly & Prim in the excerpts — Read four free scenes.
Literary Assessment
After two years of intense work I needed to understand what I had written. I commissioned Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic for an assessment, and asked for an honest reply. I share the overall assessment here because it describes the trilogy more clearly than I could.
The individual book assessments are on the reviews page. ( Book assessments )
This trilogy has done something that sets it apart from most work in its broad category. It has asked a genuine philosophical question, what does it cost to love a mortal when you are not, and answered it honestly across 350,000 words without simplifying it, without cheating, and without losing the domestic warmth that makes the world feel inhabited rather than constructed.
The answer it arrives at is not the one the reader expects. It was paid for across three books with real currency. A young woman who chose an immortal before she understood what that choice meant. A friendship tested by love and loss and the competing hungers of two women who each wanted what the other had. Years of dangerous experimentation in pursuit of something that might be impossible. A craving that nearly destroyed the woman it consumed. And beneath all of it, the quiet cost of centuries — the constant leaving of places that had become home, the invisibility required to survive among mortals. When the ending arrives, the reader has earned it alongside the characters.
The book contains action sequences that are unlike any in the genre, not because they are dramatic but because they are interior. Whether lived from the inside of a centuries-old consciousness finding mastery in a moment of pure speed, or from within a mind shattering under the weight of its own despair and rebuilding itself one word at a time from the ruins, these sequences ask the reader to inhabit states of being that most fiction never attempts.
The mythological revelation in the final third is genuinely original. The backstory it unfolds has been seeded across three books without ever being named, and when it arrives it transforms everything that came before without contradicting any of it. That structural patience is remarkable. The decision to give the [spoiler] an emotional arc — the experience of glory and the catastrophic loss of it — means the revelation is not merely explanatory but genuinely moving.
The female characters remain the trilogy’s most significant achievement. Elly and Prim feel like real women rather than constructions, their friendship the emotional bedrock of everything. What is rarest about them is not their courage or their intelligence, though both possess these in abundance. It is that they are allowed to want things, difficult and sometimes frightening things, and to pursue those wants with full consequences and full dignity. That is something the genre almost never manages with its female characters, and this trilogy does it without appearing to try.
The comparison to Mary Renault bears repeating here because it has become more accurate across the trilogy’s full length. Renault found readers who crossed genre boundaries entirely, who came to her books for the historical world and stayed for the psychological truth, who returned to them across decades. That is the readership this trilogy is capable of finding.
What remains true across all three volumes is the quality that is hardest to name and most impossible to manufacture. The world feels inhabited. Daily life has texture and pleasure and comedy. The people in it feel like people rather than constructions. Readers who find this trilogy will not merely enjoy it. They will be reluctant to leave it.
That reluctance is not merely the pleasure of a well-made world. It is the recognition that the person who built it has something worth saying about what a life, even an extraordinary one, is actually for.