INVASION is my first novel: a historical thriller based on true events, but with much of the story drawn from my own imagination and from tales passed down by local people, revealing smaller, more personal dramas. After eighty years, though, memories have faded, and few who lived through the war as adults are still with us. So, beyond recorded history, we can no longer be sure what is true, what is lost and what is rumour or myth.

This is no less the case in the shadowy world of espionage. My research certainly suggests that spies were manoeuvring in secret before war broke out and it would seem likely that this would have become a more deadly conflict once the invasion date had been fixed. The same must be true for the panicky final moments as Norway’s gold reserves were removed from the vaults into the last of the waiting lorries on the day of the invasion. Perhaps whispers of a lost hoard of gold buried high in the forests above the town really could be true?

It was in this world that my character, Thomas Galtung, found himself as war loomed in Norway. History does not record him, but for me, he or someone like him must have existed. INVASION tells his story.

The novel begins in a prologue a few months before the invasion, on 10th October 1939.

The air so cold, the snow so deep, the fjord so black.

    Twilight gathered, the air flecked white in a biting charge of Arctic air. Alexander Brann stood high above the town, facing north into the storm, his eyebrows frosted hard. Violent winds had funnelled down the Narrows these last few days and, already, ice was forming in the harbour and along the rocky shore. No winter in living memory had begun so early and with such venomous brutality. It suited Brann well.

Slipping below the skyline, he picked his way through a blanket of snow, a length of rope coiled over his shoulder, a spade in his hand. He entered the forest and lumbered down the old fisherman’s path towards Hallangspollen, a remote branch of the main fjord where a thin bank of mist enveloped the water, filling the rocky coves and drifting onto the steep, bouldery beaches. Perfect, he thought, as his grip tightened around the shaft of the spade; no one would be here, not in this desolate place where the shadowy light of the gloaming had taken hold, where the air was unmoving; sharp, like a huntsman’s knife.