The Amazing Tale of Anna Himmel and the Gold Sovereign

A young soldier critically wounded at Passchendaele. A mute little girl in 2004, having to find her voice to commit a great act of bravery. A young gay man facing terrible evil in 1960’s Manchester. A homeless woman struggling to stay alive on the freezing streets of London in 1902. In the present day, Martin Griegson, a redundant banker exposed to the darker aspects of contemporary gay London. All these lives are connected by an otherwise ordinary gold coin.

The coin starts in the ownership of Anna Himmel, who in 1878 leaves her family home in Bavaria to emigrate to New York. Through a chance meeting of the man who will later become her husband, she travels instead to London, a decision that changes her life and the lives of her descendants for generations to come. Settling in Whitechapel, she makes friends with a group of street prostitutes who will lead her towards her destiny. In 2011, Martin Griegson learns that Anna Himmel is one of his ancestors. He is intrigued to find that somehow a gold sovereign that belonged to her connects the stories of his family and friends. Employed at an LGBT outreach centre in Soho by Iris and Olga, who have their own stories to tell, Martin embarks on a personal journey of learning, where he has to eventually confront his own demons...

“I am heavily inspired by my own great-great grandmother, Anna Maria Hachtel, who came from Germany to live in Whitechapel in the 1870s and lived in the next street to the site of one of the Jack the Ripper Murders. I wanted to write a character that would reference that history,” says author Stevie Henden, of the book’s inspiration.

Stevie Henden lives in Dulwich, South London with his partner Neil and is excited to be publishing the second part of his trilogy that explores ‘adult fairytales’. He is much inspired by his own Cockney family history, who were economic migrants from Germany living in the slums of Whitechapel in the 1870s.