Every day millions of children world wide play hopscotch. Every morning and evening hundreds of thousands of commuters use London’s railway and road systems. Deep in the highlands of Wales isolated shepherds cut strange symbols into the turf in order to protect their flocks.

These otherwise totally unrelated groups are all unwitting participants in the same activity.

They are playing the Troy Game.

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The Troy Game is a four-book series, the final book due to be published in May 2007. Hades' Daughter. This is set in c. 1100 BC, describing the catastrophic events in the Aegean after the eruption of Thera, and the establishment of the Game, and of Labyrinth-London, in late Bronze-Age Britain. God's Concubine. The tale now moves into the eleventh century, and the bitter struggle for power between Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror - both vying for control for the Game. Darkwitch Rising. It is now the early-to-mid-seventeenth century. England is embroiled in civil war, kings are murdered, exiled and restored, and Cornelia-reborn is living the high life at Woburn Abbey. All have returned, dragged back this time by the Troy Game itself rather than by Asterion, and all are more powerful than ever. Moreover, Ariadne is back as well, creating mayhem and mischief (together with one of my ancestors, no less!) in the Tower of London. Darkwitch Rising is a pivotal book, because this is one of those books that just when you thought you knew where things were headed ... I've gone and changed everything. Several huge surprises, and by the end of the book some highly strange alliances are formed. Druids' Sword (a late change of title). Set during 1939-1941, mainly during the period of the London Blitz, from 7th September 1940 to 10th May 1941, the book centres on Jack Skelton's (Brutus') desperate search for a means to not only save London, but the Faerie and all those he loves. He seems helplessly trapped, unable to find a solution, watching many of those he loves best lost to death for all time, until one day he finds himself in a long forgotten crypt, staring at a piece of marzipan fruit on a chipped plate, a half-full decanter of whisky and two dirty glasses, and a receipt from a seedy hotel, all of which sit on a crumbling altar. Suddenly, he has an idea ...

To understand the Troy Game, you need first to understand where it originated - not in Troy, but in the ancient Temple Labyrinth of Crete. For my series, as for the history of the Game since the mid-Bronze Age, the story begins with the legend of Theseus. It will also help to read an only very slightly mythical history of the Troy Game itself. The four books of The Troy Game follow the fortunes of the Game from the time Brutus established the labyrinth (now known as London) in Britain to its final enactment during the Blitz of World War Two. While Brutus established the Game, he couldn't control it (or, rather, he was prevented from taking total ascendancy by the machinations of the vengeful Asterion), and the Game ropes out of control, taking on a life and purpose of its own. The Game itself is the major character of the series; it has its own purpose and its own needs. In order to fulfill both purpose and needs, it binds the major players into the Game until it has finished with them. A group of characters, those intimately connected with the Game's establishment in 1100 BC, are so trapped by the Game that they are reborn time after time, age after age, in order to play the Game through to its conclusion.