Today is the day. Magnus Patricius - The remarkable life of St Patrick, the man, has been uploaded to Lightning Source by my publisher, IndieGo Publishing LLC. It should appear on Amazon's site within the next few days, and when it does I will put links to it here. This has been a long, long haul. I began to write this book in 2006. Since then it has had two 'developmental' assessments, and three complete rewrites. I wanted this book to be as good as I could make it, and now it is through the final edits. It has been typeset, the files converted to the print and eBook formats, and it is ready to go.
The cover is to a design developed between the publisher, Pratima, an artist in India, me and Kura Carpenter. It shows how I envisage the Saint. Not dressed in the medieval splendour of a 'prince' of the church, but as a man of the people and for the people. A shepherd with his flock. As the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, the late George Otto Simms wrote, Magnus Sucatus Patricius was the first 'missionary' Bishop to anywhere since St Paul. In Patrick's time the church sent bishops to existing communities once they had reached a certain size, but Patrick was different. He went to a country in which Christians were largely slaves, and the rulers of the land and it's native population were pagan.
It was a society ruled by harsh laws, and harsher gods. A society where strength of arms was admired, and this unarmed man wandered into the lion's den. He refused to be intimidated, he refused to be cowed by threats, and he prevailed. I hope I have done his story justice.