Chris Heal

Chris Heal's latest book, released in June 2026, is 'Lion Man', the last of his hospital trilogy.

Heal has travelled as a nomad around the world and lived in several countries, working for multinationals and running his own businesses. He retired for the fifth time and completed a PhD at Bristol University when he was sixty-five-years-old. His academic work received many awards and was reviewed as ‘first-rate, well-written with immensely impressive scholarship’. He then took up writing full-time and now lives in Hampshire, UK.

Heal’s subjects are eclectic, usually a fresh and deeply researched outlook on an aspect of world or local history or a part fictional adventure in a troubled modern setting. He draws heavily on his own experiences and regularly questions popular moral positions. It is also often difficult to know where the story starts and the truth ends.

In 2025, Heal had a heart attack which left him near death. In his hospital bed, he found counting helped relieve the monotony. He plotted three books to drag himself back to the land of the living. The first two, 'Glimpses of the Famous' and 'eating wildly', are autobiographical short stories of his trivial meetings with 70 very famous people and 150 meals of very different species he had eaten in some place or other. The last of the trilogy, 'Lion Man', is much more serious. It is an archaeological mystery set among the artwork of palaeolithic caves and native tribes. The book uses hallucination and psychedelic drugs as a background for murder and seeks the origins of religion and genocide as it flipflops with a purpose between the current day and the time when, 40,000 years ago, African Homo sapiens came upon the European Neanderthals.

Heal published his first major book, 'Sound of Hunger', in 2018. Widely acclaimed, and sometimes damned, the social biography was used in Germany as a university text to challenge that country's political and militaristic development from Bismarck to Hitler. It is an international and exciting investigation which ends with the real-life re-joining of two families split by the world's great wars. Two commissioned companion investigations detail the careers of the Gerth brothers, both WW1 u-boat captains whose experiences of conflict led to very different and dramatic lives: 'Saints & Sinners' (Erich Gerth) and 'The War of The Raven' (Georg Gerth).

'This is gripping stuff and should not disappoint its audiences … An objective, dispassionate view of German history … The depth & breadth is staggering. The range of events and subjects covered and the information imparted is almost too complex to state other than you would have to read a dozen additional books (and I have) to get anywhere close to what’s given you … Excellent work … Here is a title that stands out and deserves it place on (and one hopes frequently off) the shelf … A major contribution on WW1 military history.'

The Ridge Trilogy, written around 2020, presents three very different views of local Hampshire history.

'The Four Marks Murders' tells of the altogether unpleasant, shocking and true underbelly of a sleepy Hampshire village before it was ripped apart by relentless development. The twenty chapters recount over sixty violent deaths, many hangings, judicial and otherwise, and several suicides. On numbers sold, every local bookshelf has a copy.

'Ropley's Legacy' is the story of the enclosure of the commons and commons fields of the ridge parishes in Hampshire. In 1709, Ropley was England's very first private parliamentary enclosure and was bitterly contested. The gentry's land grab, led by successive bishops of Winchester, spread to neighbouring parishes. The gentry always won. The voiceless commoners were deliberately trapped into forced labour or allowed to drift to the workhouses or the factory towns. However, there was retaliation: violent poaching in the bishop's deer parks and the setting up of regiments to support an invasion by the Jacobite claimants to the throne.

'The Winchester Tales' is the story of the Norman invasion of the city. Gilbert of Bayeux, orphan, a young, natural administrator and brilliant linguist, is called to Winchester from Normandy to oversee the theft of lands from the English who fell at Hastings. He finds his Lord, bishop Odo, the new king’s half-brother, is the most avaricious and devious of all.

A semi-fictional autobiography, 'Disappearing', begins with the author’s early experiences in Morocco and in the Biafran War. As a 'bolshy pensioner with a mission', upset by what life has brought, Heal decides on a great experiment: to disappear. On the run, he is forced to revisit his old haunts. The result is a slow-burner of covert information, rebellion, escapism, and a high body count. The security community called his disclosures 'subversive' and tried hard to ban the book. The failed attempt brought an international best-seller.

'Reappearing' followed demand for a sequel. Heal’s final journey takes him through the decline of the French empire, the terror of Islamic insurgency and the modern African slave trade. His nomadic life leads him to places he really shouldn’t visit in a quest for his unknown father. This is an intelligent detective story, wrapped up in a global travel adventure and set against the background of twentieth century history.