Pentrich, England's Last Armed Rising

On a night of relentless rain in June 1817, fifty men gathered in a stone barn in the Derbyshire hills. They took up pikes forged in a preacher's quarry and set out to overthrow the British government. By dawn a young farm servant lay dead, the gates of a great ironworks had closed against them, and twenty dragoons were waiting on the Nottingham road.

This gripping work of narrative history reconstructs the Pentrich Rising, the last armed attempt at revolution in England. It runs from the volcanic winter that starved the Midlands to the scaffold at Derby, where three men were hanged and beheaded while the nation mourned a dead princess. At its heart stands William Oliver, a bankrupt surveyor turned government spy, who travelled the manufacturing districts promising a national insurrection that never existed.

Drawing on trial testimony, Home Office papers and the voices of the villagers themselves, Conroy Clune brings to life framework knitters and quarrymen, a Methodist preacher and an old soldier, a Home Secretary and a courageous ironworks manager. The result is a story of hunger, hope, betrayal and state repression whose echoes reach from Peterloo to the ballot box.

They were promised a revolution. They were given a trap.

Conroy Clune grew up in Belfast, in a family where history was argued over at the kitchen table and every street seemed to carry a memory of protest, informers and reprisal. That upbringing left him with a lasting fascination with ordinary people caught between hunger and power, and with the spies and courts that decided their fate. A lifelong walker of old roads and reader of trial records, he is drawn to the moments when forgotten villages briefly stand at the centre of a nation's story. His narrative histories bring those moments back to life with a storyteller's eye and a historian's care. He lives on the island of Ireland, where he is at work on his next book.