My debut novel, The Lion of Shinar, is now available in print and ebook. It is the first branch of The Book of the Western Veil, a historical and mythological saga I've been working on for the past year.
The Lion of Shinar. Branch I of The Book of the Western Veil. A debut novel by Elwyn Davies.
The story begins in ancient Mesopotamia, around 4000 BC, with Nimrod, a young hunter who will become king of Shinar and oversee the building of Babel. Genesis gives us remarkably little about Nimrod. Josephus adds to the account, and later traditions disagree on almost everything else. We know him as a mighty hunter, a king and the man associated with the Tower of Babel, but very little about the people around him or the world in which he lived.
That gave me a fair amount to work with.
The novel follows the rise of Nimrod and the fourteen summers spent building Babel. At its centre are the relationships between those who build the city, those who govern it, and those who have their own plans for its future. I've tried to give the ancient world a physical reality, drawing on what we know of early Mesopotamian settlements, agriculture, trade and construction, while allowing the mythology to unfold alongside it.
The wider story is recorded in the leaves of Brother Wyn, a Welsh monk writing in the tenth century. His account was hidden at Caermynach, the farmhouse below Mynydd Epynt where I grew up. I'm now working through those leaves from the same farm, some eleven centuries after Wyn put them to parchment.
This project began with Second Dawn, a musical inspired by the Mabinogion. The research took me further back through Welsh tradition, Greek mythology, the Old Testament and the earliest Mesopotamian accounts. I now have a framework for thirty novels, along with an expanding collection of music and shorter stories. The second novel, The Scattered, is already written, and the third is well underway.
For those interested in historical fiction, particularly the work of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden and Robert Harris, I'd be interested to hear what you make of The Lion of Shinar. I'm also curious to discover which readers it reaches beyond that audience.
You can purchase all formats directly from Amazon, or listen to the music and accompanying stories here: thelionofshinar.com
Diolch am ddarllen.
Elwyn
