Today, I am delighted to welcome Steven Phillips to Yarde Book Promotions to talk about The Crossing, the first novel in his ambitious eight-book historical fiction saga, Blood of the Crossing.
Beginning in Wales in 1608, the novel follows Rhys, Margaret and young Elin, three people whose lives have been shaped by loss, injustice and circumstances beyond their control. When the possibility of a new beginning in Virginia presents itself, they embark upon a perilous Atlantic crossing, leaving behind everything familiar for a land that promises opportunity but offers no guarantees of survival.
Against the backdrop of the struggling Jamestown colony, The Crossing explores the difficult choices faced by ordinary people caught up in extraordinary historical events, while questioning what it means to belong somewhere and the price that others may pay for that belonging.
Steven joins me today to talk about the family history that inspired the saga, the research behind his portrayal of early colonial Virginia, and how the experiences of one family in the seventeenth century will continue to shape their descendants over the next four hundred years.
But first, let's check out The Crossing
Publisher: Steven Phillips
Print Length: 354 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Some journeys begin with a dream. Rhys ap Hywel's begins with a lock.
Wales, 1608. When Rhys is driven from his family's cottage and stripped of the land and flock that sustained them, Virginia offers one last hope-a new beginning across the sea.
Margaret "Meg" Hughes is a widow determined that no man will decide her future-or Elin's. On the dangerous voyage to Jamestown, her path collides with Rhys's. Bound first by necessity and then by a fierce partnership, they set out to build a home on the contested banks of the James River.
But in a colony ruled by hunger, debt, and fragile claims, every acre carries a price. As colonial expansion collides with Indigenous lives, a name written in a ledger can mean the difference between belonging and disappearance. And with the reckoning of 1622 drawing near, everything Rhys and Meg have fought to build may be swept away.
The Crossing is Book One of Blood of the Crossing-a sweeping historical saga of loss, courage, love, survival, and the price of claiming a life of your own.
The Crossing begins in 1608 and takes readers from Wales towards colonial Virginia. What made this particular moment in your family’s imagined history the right place to begin the Blood of the Crossing saga?
My interest began with genealogy and the unanswered questions in my own family history. I could trace names through Virginia and across the American interior, but the further back I went, the more those people became little more than entries in records. I wanted to imagine the lives that might have existed between those entries.
The year 1608 felt like the right beginning because both Wales and Virginia were undergoing enormous change. In Wales, English law could separate a family from its land, name and inheritance. Across the Atlantic, Jamestown was still a desperate and uncertain experiment rather than an established colony.
That gave me a natural starting point for the larger saga. One family loses its place in the old world and goes looking for another, only to discover that the new world is already someone else’s home. The choices made during that first crossing continue to shape the generations that follow.
The novel begins with the striking image of a locked cottage in Wales. Without giving too much away, what is happening in the lives of your characters at this point, and what forces them towards the enormous upheaval that follows?
At the beginning of the novel, Rhys is watching his life being taken from him in a very ordinary, official way. There isn’t an army at his door. A man simply arrives with an English iron lock and places it on the cottage Rhys believed would always be his. With that act, he loses his home, flock and inheritance.
Margaret is facing a different kind of danger. She is a widow with very little legal or economic protection, and she is determined to keep her young cousin Elin from being sold into service. Rhys, Margaret and Elin are all being told, in different ways, that they have no secure place in the world around them.
Virginia offers the possibility of land and a new beginning, but none of them truly understands what that promise will cost. They don’t leave because they are fearless adventurers. They leave because remaining where they are has become impossible.
For people leaving Britain in the early seventeenth century, crossing the Atlantic meant entering a world of extraordinary uncertainty. What did you want readers to understand about the physical and emotional reality of making that journey?
I wanted the crossing to feel like an ordeal rather than a romantic voyage. Drawing from my own personal experience of being at sea for months at a time. Passengers lived for weeks or months in cramped, filthy conditions with spoiled food, limited water, sickness, storms and almost no privacy. They had no reliable way to know where they were, how long the journey would take or whether they would survive it.
The emotional uncertainty was just as important. Once the coastline disappeared, there was no easy way back. The people aboard had left behind homes, graves, families and familiar landscapes. Even those travelling willingly must have understood that they might never see Britain again.
There was also the question of identity. Rhys appears within the official machinery of the voyage, but Margaret and Elin are not entered in the passenger record. That reflects a larger truth behind the novel: many people made these journeys without leaving a clear written trace. They still lived, suffered, loved and influenced what came afterward, even if history failed to preserve their names.
You describe The Crossing as a fictionalised family history, using real ships, laws and historical events while giving imagined voices to people who left little or no written record. How did you approach creating characters who feel fully alive while remaining respectful of what the historical evidence can actually tell us?
I tried to be very clear with myself about the boundary between evidence and imagination. The central household is fictional, but the world surrounding it is not. The Mary and Margaret, the Second Supply, the laws, the conditions at Jamestown and the larger events affecting the colony are grounded in the historical record.
Research gave me the limits within which the characters could live. I looked at what people ate, how they travelled, what rights they did or did not possess, and what choices were realistically available to them. Within those boundaries, imagination allowed me to ask what fear, loyalty, grief and hope might have felt like.
I never wanted to treat a gap in the record as proof that my version must have happened. Silence creates possibility, not certainty. My goal was to give overlooked people emotional weight without claiming that fiction had solved the historical mystery. They are imagined lives, but I wanted them to inhabit their time honestly.
Survival is clearly central to the novel, but survival can require difficult choices. Were you interested in exploring not only what your characters endure, but what those experiences might force them to become?
Very much so. Survival stories can become too simple if survival itself is treated as proof of virtue. People under extreme pressure do things they never believed they were capable of doing. Some of those choices are courageous. Others carry guilt, shame or consequences that don’t disappear when the immediate danger has passed.
Rhys begins the story believing that land and hard work will allow him to rebuild what was taken from him. Margaret understands more quickly that survival also depends upon reading people, withholding information and knowing when the rules are designed to work against you. Both characters change because the world will not allow them to remain who they were.
I was interested in the small compromises as much as the dramatic ones. At what point does endurance harden into ruthlessness? What parts of yourself can you surrender and still recognise the person who survives? Those questions begin in this novel, but they also follow the family through the wider saga.
Colonial Virginia is sometimes presented through the familiar language of opportunity and settlement. Did writing The Crossing give you an opportunity to look beyond that traditional narrative and explore the harsher realities behind the establishment of the colony?
Yes. The language of opportunity is part of the story because people genuinely crossed the Atlantic believing Virginia might offer land, advancement or freedom from an old life. But that promise existed alongside hunger, disease, violence, forced labour, political rivalry and an almost catastrophic misunderstanding of the land and its people.
It was important to show Jamestown as fragile and often badly managed. The English did not simply arrive, clear some land and begin a successful country. They entered a Powhatan world with its own communities, alliances, rivalries and relationship to the land. What the newcomers called settlement could look very different to the people already living there.
I didn’t want to replace one simplified version with another. The colonists could be desperate and vulnerable while also contributing to dispossession and violence. Rhys and Margaret may be victims of power in Wales, but arriving in Virginia does not automatically place them on the morally innocent side of history.
The book moves between very different landscapes, from Wales to an Atlantic crossing and eventually the James. How important was landscape to the story, and how did you make these places feel immediate to a modern reader?
Landscape is almost another character in the novel. Wales represents familiarity, memory and belonging, even as that belonging is being taken away. The Atlantic removes every fixed point and places the characters in a world that can change from calm to deadly within hours. Virginia offers space and possibility, but it is also unfamiliar, dangerous and resistant to the expectations the English bring with them.
I tried to make each place immediate through the physical things the characters would notice: wet wool, mud, smoke, crowded sleeping spaces, spoiled water, the movement of a ship beneath tired bodies, the heat and insects along the James. Those details matter because the characters don’t experience history as a list of dates. They experience it through discomfort, hunger, weather and exhaustion.
The changing landscape also mirrors their emotional journey. They move from a home they understand, across a world with no solid ground, and into a place they hope to claim but do not yet comprehend.
You have described the central question running through the saga as “who gets written, who gets spent, and what a house is worth.” What does that question mean to you, and how does it begin to emerge in The Crossing?
“Who gets written” refers to the people whose names enter the official record and those who disappear from it. History often preserves the landowner, shipmaster, official or soldier while leaving women, labourers, servants and displaced families unnamed.
“Who gets spent” asks which lives are treated as necessary costs. Governments, investors and colonial leaders could speak about expansion and profit while ordinary people absorbed the hunger, labour and violence that made those ambitions possible.
The house brings those ideas into something personal. A house is shelter, but it is also memory, identity and proof that someone belonged somewhere. Rhys begins the novel when a lock is placed on his home in Wales. He goes to Virginia hoping to build another, but any house built there raises a more difficult question: what does it mean to rebuild your life on land that already holds someone else’s history?
That tension begins with one locked door and continues across the generations.
This is the first novel in an ambitious eight-book saga spanning four centuries. How much did you need to know about the generations that would follow before you could confidently write this first family's story?
I needed to know the spine of the larger story before writing the first book. I had to understand where the bloodline was going, which historical turning points would shape it and what would be carried from one generation to the next. Otherwise, the choices made in The Crossing might not have had the weight they needed.
At the same time, I didn’t want to plan every descendant so tightly that the later books had no room to breathe. Families rarely move through history in a straight line. Names change, stories are misremembered, people disappear from records, and later generations inherit consequences without fully understanding where they began.
What I needed most was a clear sense of inheritance—not only land or blood, but habits, fears, ambitions and unfinished debts. The saga follows one family from Wales through Virginia and eventually across the American interior. Each book will stand within its own period, but the emotional foundation is laid by Rhys, Margaret and Elin.
For a reader opening The Crossing without knowing anything about the history behind it, what do you hope will make them care enough about this family to want to follow their bloodline through the next seven books?
I hope readers care about them first as people rather than as historical figures. You don’t need to know anything about seventeenth-century Wales, Jamestown or the Second Supply to understand what it means to lose a home, protect someone you love or take a frightening chance because every safer choice has disappeared.
Rhys, Margaret and Elin each respond differently to danger. Rhys wants to build something that cannot be taken from him. Margaret is determined to keep her household together in a world that barely recognizes her authority. Elin brings honesty, humor and life to circumstances that could otherwise become unbearably dark.
If readers finish the book wondering not only what happens next, but what parts of these three people will survive in their descendants, then the first novel has done its job. The larger saga is about the making of a family, but it is also about what families remember, what they bury and what history refuses to let them escape.
A huge thank you to Steven Phillips for joining me today and sharing the fascinating background to The Crossing.
If you enjoy richly researched historical fiction, family sagas, early American history and stories exploring survival, belonging and the lasting consequences of difficult choices, then The Crossing is certainly one to add to your reading list.
Steven Phillips
Steven Phillips is the author of the Blood of the Crossing saga, a historical fiction series set across seventeenth-century Wales, the Atlantic, and colonial Virginia. His writing is rooted in years of genealogical research into Welsh and early American migration, and in a deep fascination with the ordinary people whose lives shaped history from below.
Before writing fiction, Steven spent decades tracing family lines through parish registers, court records, ship manifests, and land grants — the same documents that appear, transformed, in the world of Rhys and Meg. That research gave him not only a detailed picture of the period, but a profound respect for the men and women who crossed oceans with almost nothing and built lives in a world that offered them very little.
The Crossing, Book One of the Blood of the Crossing saga, is his debut novel. He is currently at work on Book Two.
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Mary Anne xxx