About

The Author

R.J. Thornton

R.J. Thornton writes literary fantasy for readers who have stood in a hotel bar with old friends and felt, for a moment, that they have been standing in this particular light together for much longer than their CV accounts for.

The Keepers is the first series. Set across the modern Microsoft conference circuit and the old stones of the Norse world, it is a story about the things we carry, the people we find again, and the bindings we are born to hold — whether we remember making them or not.

Thornton writes under a pen name. The legal name is Rurik Jesper Thornton — a strict anagram of the author's real name, every letter accounted for, none added. Pronounced ROO-rik YES-per THORN-ton. It is on file where it needs to be. It is not the name the public ever sees.

Influences: Stephen R. Lawhead for the ley-line realism and the weight of old promises. C.S. Lewis for the friendships that carry the world. J.R.R. Tolkien for the sense that the past is very close and very present. Susanna Clarke for the prose. The Microsoft Ignite conference circuit for the texture of where modern people actually live.

“What we choose to carry, carries us.”

The Imprint

Holdfast Press

Holdfast is an Old English and Old Norse word meaning a stronghold, a thing that endures — also the verb itself, to hold fast. It is, in a single word, what the series is about.

Holdfast Press publishes literary fantasy for the bookshelf that takes its fantasies seriously: readers of Lawhead, Tolkien, Lewis, Clarke. Stories in which the friendships are the soul of the book, the losses are real, and the world is stranger and older than it appears.

The Keepers is the first series. Future series follow. The imprint is not a vehicle for everything the author writes — it is for the literary-fantasy shelf specifically, and for readers who want to carry something home.

The mark is a Norse interlace knot drawn as a single continuous line, forming a nearly-closed ring — with one small break. The ring almost holds. It doesn't quite. The series is literally about bindings that are failing. The mark is that.

Holdfast Press — Books that hold. — holdfastpress.com

Get in Touch

Contact

For general enquiries, press, or to submit a dream:

Follow the work on @holdfastpress.