of the World Blues to suggest that the books are not set in our reality. The Fallen Blade is the first of three novels set in an alternative early-15th century featuring Tycho, fallen angel and assassin, at the Venetian court, in a Venice where Marco Polo's family have been hereditary dukes for five generations and the Mongol emperor Tamberlaine has conquered China, making him the most powerful ruler in the world. The second novel in the Assassini series, The Outcast Blade was published in 2012, with the third The Exiled Blade published 2013. The novels take as a template sequences and tropes from Shakespeare's plays Othello, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. The novels have been sold into a number of languages. His first literary novel, The Last Banquet, as Jonathan Grimwood, was published in 2013 by Canongate Booksin the UK, Europa Editions in the US, and Éditions Terra Nova in France, among others. Referencing Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade — and picaresque in the style of Candide — it tells the semi magic realist tale of an aristocrat prepared to eat anything, and covers the run up to the French Revolution from the early to late 18th century. The French France 5 critic Gérard Collard called Le Dernier Banquet "" (the book of the year). It was an NPR Best Book of the Year for 2013 'Foodies and Francophiles alike will relish this debut novel about Jean-Marie d'Aumout, whom we first meet crunching beetles as a starving orphaned son of nobility in 1723...’ In January 2015 it was shortlisted for Le Prix Montesquieu. The book was also nominated for the Bad Sex Awards for a scene involving Brie and breast milk. As Jack Grimwood, he is writing thrillers for Penguin Books. The first, Moskva, Spring 2016, is set in 1980s Soviet Moscow. The second, Nightfall Berlin was published in May 2018. 2021’s Island Reich, the first stand-alone novel written as Jack Grimwood, mixes the story of the fictional safe cracker and conman Bill O’Hagan, with the Battle of France in June 1940, the German occupation of the Channel Islands, the Duke of Windsor’s exile in Portugal and Operation Willi, the supposed Nazi plot to kidnap the duke and return him to the British throne as a puppet monarch. Midnight Sun, the third Tom Fox novel, is due Summer 2023. Grimwood was guest of honour at Novacon in