A long silence, but there was a reason for it. I've spent the past 18 months working on my new novel The Deer Wedding. What began with a chance visit to a Dalmatian island over twelve years ago with a theatre company intent on staging a play by Shakespeare on a beach with a cast of fishermen, refugees and drama students, has now mutated into a narrative set over two generations and two brutal wars. It also follows the controversial history of two very special paintings, one of which bears the title of the book.

My journey to Croatia took place just a couple of years after the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s; the economy was in freefall and Kosovo was turning into another potential hot spot. I had a slip of paper with a mobile number on it for a man called Igor, who was going to meet me on the island of Hvar. The tourist trade had begun to recover on the islands, but many places familiar to the backpackers of yesteryear were now home to refugees from the conflict. There were only too many signs of what had been, including the presence of UN personnel in cities like Zagreb. In the city bars, I met people my own age who had fought, or tried not to fight. I read Rebecca West's extraordinary book Black Lamb, Grey Falcon with a view to orientating myself in the complex, labyrinth history of this part of the world, but found myself going back to the future. So many debates of the late 1930s were still circling in the streets I was walking; the faded beauty of the Jewish cemetery in Split set me on the trail of the Italian community in Croatia, amongst them Vid Morpurgo who set up Europe's oldest bookshop back in the 1860's. (And yes, he is related in some way to Michael "War Horse" Morpurgo).

Two years after sending off a very early draft to the publishers Alcemi, The Deer Wedding is ready to launch. Thurs 30 September, in Cardiff's popular Cameo Club in Pontcanna. If you want to know more, visit www.deerwedding.com . There's a trailer to whet the appetite - filmed by award winning Welsh director DJ Evans - complete with a life sized crucifix we carried from Welsh National Opera's props warehouse to a derelict site in the old docks to film a landscape we hoped looked like city emerging from civil war. Let me know what you think! The book is available to buy from Amazon from the 30th.