Cities are laid down in layers: all times from their beginning to the modern day exist simultaneously, one on top of the other. There are places like Nottingham where caves puncture those layers of time, lifting the past up to view in the present. There is a young woman called Anna Partington who can slide between times all by herself. These are her stories:

In ‘Everyday Ghosts’, we meet Anna Partington and learn of her extraordinary ability. After Anna’s mother died she became homeless. She searches Nottingham for her aunt who may be the only relative who can help. The search seems hopeless yet she has an extraordinary ability to observe those who lived in the past. When Anna is attacked it triggers an even greater power to physically vanish from the present and flee back in time. Her apparently random journeys begin to reveal a common link to her family. Anna discovers that she is not the only one with such an unusual talent. Rob Ahmed travels with her to medieval Nottingham where they find great social injustice. And in fighting that injustice they invoke the legend of Robin Hood.

You can find the ebook of ‘Everyday Ghosts‘ at:

https://books2read.com/u/mBJ2DN

In ‘Everyday Spirits’ Anna Partington is determined to understand why she can travel through time. Anna goes searching for ancestors who might help. Her journeys take her to 1940s Normandy where the locals are about to be ripped from their homes by invasion. Delving further into the past, Anna is alarmed to discover that medieval Normandy was also invaded. By English.

Anna is taken to prehistoric Brittany where she is shocked to learn that someone she thought to be dead may have survived…

You can find the ebook of ‘Everyday Spirits‘ at:

https://books2read.com/u/mKAw15

Who tells the legends and how do they start? In ‘Everyday Legends’, Anna travels to first century Ireland, then further back in time to the neolithic stone circle at Avebury, in Wiltshire. She feels she is chasing shadows yet the shadows are chasing her. They turn out to conceal her own family and some of them want her dead…

You can find the ebook of ‘Everyday Spirits‘ at:

https://books2read.com/u/b6avn0

While these stories are speculative, they are set in recorded history. Anna’s ability to walk between times is a leap of fantasy, yet the worlds she encounters were real, and sometimes far stranger than fiction.

Did you know there used to be a wall down the middle of Nottingham’s market square to divide Norman law from Saxon law? And did you know that Nottingham is peppered with hundreds of caves, many of them centuries old, all dug by the people who lived there?

It came as an unpleasant surprise to me that thousands of people living in Normandy were killed by Allied bombs in 1944 and that the same area was under (often brutal) English occupation in the fifteenth century.

The standing stones and Silbury Hill at Avebury are sources of wonder and speculation. Many have sought to unravel their purpose and I have borrowed a few ideas from archeologists who suggest that the stone circle at Avebury may have been a gathering place for great events.