DreamEngine Publishing

DreamEngine - Publishing House
Check out BE HERE NOW - Paul Carroll's crazy take on the Oasis reunion! Link on website

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

There is a particular kind of British fiction that takes the absurdity of the present moment and makes it funnier, darker, and more uncomfortably recognisable than the news ever manages. Paul Carroll writes that kind of fiction.

His debut novel, Shaking Hands with Elvis, imagined a privatised assisted dying clinic open for business after the government sold off the NHS. His follow-up, Be Here Now, turns the same satirical precision on music festivals, corporate greenwashing, and the Oasis reunion as cultural spectacle - a one-off gig on a wind turbine eco-island, billed as the greenest live music event of all time, attended by middle-aged Manc mates trying to recapture their youth and activists who have other plans entirely.

Two novels. Two targets. The same sharp, unsentimental eye.

We are proud to publish Paul Carroll. Both titles are available now in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

We are selective about the authors we publish. That selectivity is not simply about prose quality, though that matters. It is also about whether a writer has something to say that only they could say.

Frances J MacGregor has that, in full measure.

Frances grew up in a small mill town in Northern England and spent forty years as a social worker with children who had been hurt, brutalised, and damaged by the adults who should have protected them. She brought every year of that experience to her debut novel, Monday Monday - and the difference it makes to the work is felt on every page.

The novel spans four decades in the life of Vonnie, whose world fractures one February morning when she is ten years old. Two Mondays, thirty-five years apart, bookend a story about the long road between damage and the possibility of something better. It is a family saga with the emotional precision that only a writer of Frances's professional background could bring to it.

Monday Monday was published in December 2022 and is available in paperback and Kindle.

We are proud to have Frances among our authors. Her work is precisely what we mean when we say that an acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work.

Available in paperback and Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

There is a particular kind of historical fiction that does something more than entertain. It recovers what was lost.

Tina Zee's Cartimandua Trilogy has always been that kind of work. Set in Iron Age Yorkshire and Cumbria, rooted in the real history of a queen who ruled and fought and endured at the moment Rome came for Britain, these books do not dress up the past in comfortable fiction. They take it seriously. Tina takes it seriously.

Blood of Brigantia, the trilogy's concluding volume, is published. Civil war. Roman legions. A husband's betrayal. Cartimandua has survived everything history threw at her, and now readers will find out what that survival costs.

We are proud to have published all three books in this series. Tina Zee is a writer who understands that the most powerful women's stories are often the ones history neglected to remember.

The complete Cartimandua Trilogy is available in paperback and Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

There is a moment in every acquisition conversation where we know whether a manuscript has genuine originality or simply the appearance of it.

With Carolyn Goodyear's The Magical World of Lilly Lemoncello, we knew within pages.

The novel begins with a birth, a decision, and a game of eeny meeny miny moe that separates twin sisters along the lines of skin colour -- sending one home to her mother and leaving the other on the doorstep of 11 Bluebell Drive, home to a secret cross-dressing vicar and his formidably conservative wife, Maureen Hicklebottom.

What follows is darkly comic, warmly human, and executed with the theatrical precision you would expect from an author who trained at Richmond Drama School, won the De-Leon prize for best actress, and spent years as a writer and producer of her own work.

Carolyn did not arrive at fiction by accident. She arrived at it with a developed understanding of character, timing, and the mechanics of how a story holds an audience. That background is present on every page.

An acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work. The Magical World of Lilly Lemoncello earned its place on our list.

Available now in paperback and on Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

There is a particular kind of travel writing that reads as though the author genuinely had no idea what was coming next. David Baboulene's Shipboard Adventures series has that quality, because he genuinely did not.

David ran away to sea on merchant ships, circled the globe across multiple voyages, and then wrote about it with the precision of someone who also holds a PhD in story theory. The result is humorous travel memoir that knows exactly what it is doing, even when its narrator appears to have no idea whatsoever.

Ocean Boulevard, Book 1 in the series, traces the journey from the Southern States of America through Barbados, Jamaica, the Panama Canal, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and the Azores before arriving home in Liverpool. Borders Books described it as "Bryson who has really played the field." We think that captures it accurately.

Jumping Ships, Book 2, takes David, Windy, and NotNorman further afield still. Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Greece, India, Thailand, and Canada. Reviewed by Ships Monthly and Sea Breezes Magazine. Considerably less sensible than it sounds.

David is also, for context, the co-founder of DreamEngine Publishing and a story consultant who has worked with the writers behind Back to the Future, Jack Reacher, and Only Fools and Horses. He brings that same understanding of what makes a story hold together to everything he writes.

Both books are available now in paperback and on Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

We are selective about the authors we publish. Steve Askham is exactly the kind of writer we look for.

Four decades navigating the international fruit trade gave Steve Askham something most authors take years to build: a genuinely singular perspective, an inexhaustible supply of remarkable material, and the wit to know how to use both. Life's a Peach: The Secret Life of an International Fruit Trader is the result, and it is one of those books that is almost impossible to describe without making someone immediately want to read it.

The hook is the secret life. The suggestion that forty years as a fruit trader could be, if a man wanted it to be, the most elegant cover story imaginable. What lies beneath? Steve is not entirely giving that away. What he does give away is the astonishing world behind the fruit we take for granted: histories, peculiarities, biological improbabilities, and the kind of insider knowledge that only four decades in the trade could produce.

Humorous narrative non-fiction at its best. Conversational in tone, genuinely surprising in content, and written by someone who clearly knows precisely what he is doing.

Life's a Peach is available now in paperback and on Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Some books are researched. Monday Monday was lived.

Frances J MacGregor grew up in a small mill town in Northern England and spent forty years as a social worker with children who had been hurt, brutalised, and failed by the adults who should have protected them. When she sat down to write Vonnie's story, she brought that entire working life with her.

The novel follows Vonnie from the Monday in February when, aged ten, she loses both parents in a single day, through to a second Monday thirty-five years later. Between those two points: every relationship shaped by an absence, every attempt at connection shadowed by the belief that she was simply not worth staying for.

For readers who love the long, emotionally resonant family fiction of Rosamund Pilcher, Monday Monday offers something additional: the weight of professional truth behind every human detail.

We are proud to publish Frances J MacGregor. This is exactly the kind of work we exist to bring into print.

Available in paperback and Kindle. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

We are selective about the authors we publish. When we accepted Paul Meachair's Belleau Wood, it was because the manuscript demonstrated something we do not encounter as often as we would like: a writer who understands both the architecture of a compelling story and the psychological truth of the people inside it.

Paul Meachair is the fiction pen name of a sports psychologist with a Ph.D. and decades of professional practice working with athletes in high-pressure environments. That background is not incidental to the writing. It shapes it. Belleau Wood is historical action fiction set during the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918, and at its centre is a man condemned to face a firing squad on charges he did not commit. The tension that holds that narrative together is not manufactured. It comes from a writer who has spent a career studying what pressure does to people.

The accompanying screenplay has won two international awards: the Liverpool Indie Awards and the Birsamunda International Film Award. Award recognition does not make a novel good. But it does confirm that independent judges, in a competitive field, found the story and its execution outstanding.

We are proud to publish Paul Meachair. Belleau Wood is available now in paperback and on Kindle. Link in bio

[Julian DeVille @realdeville1963]

"For sale, baby shoes, never worn." Hemingway never tells you the story. The reader constructs it. The gap is the story. This Friday I'll explain why its absence was costing me every submission I made. @StoryMeBad @DreamEngineuk

[Julian DeVille @realdeville1963]

Hundreds of thousands of words. Adding material, tweaking, turning things up and down. All along there was a key factor missing. Something a literary agent identifies within seconds of turning a page. Tomorrow at ten. @StoryMeBad @DreamEngineuk

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Not every manuscript that comes to us earns a place on our list. Carolyn Goodyear's did - and the reason starts with a premise that stopped us in our tracks.

A teenager gives birth to non-identical twin girls, one black and one white. Their futures are decided by a children's rhyme. One goes home with her mother. The other is left on the doorstep of a vicar who has a secret his conservative wife Maureen Hicklebottom has not yet uncovered.

*The Magical World of Lilly Lemoncello* is the kind of dark comedy that earns the description warmly human, because underneath the audacity of the setup there is real compassion for every character Carolyn places on the page. Her background in acting -- Richmond Drama School, the De-Leon prize, the Meisner Technique, masterclasses with LA coach Bernard Hiller -- gives her an instinct for character and dialogue that publishing schools cannot teach.

This is fiction that does not fit neatly into a box, which is precisely why we published it.

Available in paperback and Kindle. Find the link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Two books. Two satirical precision strikes at the state of contemporary Britain. One author who clearly finds the whole situation both appalling and deeply funny.

We are proud to publish Paul Carroll, whose debut Shaking Hands with Elvis arrived in January 2024 and whose second novel Be Here Now landed this month. Between them, they cover assisted dying legislation, NHS privatisation, the Oasis reunion, greenwashing, festival capitalism, and the particular misery of paying corporate prices to feel young again. Paul is working through the material at pace.

His background is in PR - clients including Boddingtons and Heineken, a career spent understanding how organisations want to be perceived and how that perception is constructed. His fiction is, in part, what happens when someone with that particular set of skills stops building the image and starts pulling it apart.

Shaking Hands with Elvis drew the comparison to Black Mirror from its first reviewers. Be Here Now skewers the cultural moment around the Oasis reunion with the kind of specificity that only comes from someone paying close attention to how we convince ourselves that things matter.

We are selective about the authors we publish. Paul Carroll is precisely the kind of writer we are here for: sharp, serious about the craft, and working in a register that British fiction needs more of.

Both novels are available in paperback and Kindle. Shaking Hands with Elvis is also available as an audiobook. Link in bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Most memoirs tell you what someone did. Life's a Peach hints at what they might have been doing instead.

Steve Askham spent four decades in the international fruit trade, which, as he notes, could barely be a better cover story for someone with an alter ego and a secret life running beneath the surface. The result is humorous narrative non-fiction that operates on more than one level: part insider account of a genuinely fascinating global industry, part memoir with a knowing wink, and entirely its own thing.

We are proud to have published it.

The fruit trade turns out to be extraordinary territory: the history of the pineapple, the remarkable properties of the passion fruit, and facts that will change the way you look at your weekly shop in ways you did not anticipate. Steve delivers all of it with wit, authority, and the confidence of someone who has spent forty years in rooms most readers will never enter.

Life's a Peach by Steve Askham. Available in paperback and on Kindle now.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

An agent rejected your manuscript. Not because it was poorly written. Because they could not find you online.

This is not speculation - it is how literary representation actually works in 2026. Before an agent reads a single page, they search your name. What they find (or do not find) shapes everything that follows. A strong manuscript from an invisible author is, from the industry's perspective, a risk they do not need to take.

DreamEngine Publishing was built around this reality. We are a selective independent UK publisher that combines professional publication with the Author Mythology framework - a strategic approach to building the author platform that traditional publishing demands but does nothing to help you create.

Our authors are published to full professional standards: editorial, design, metadata, distribution. They also work with us to construct the platform identity, positioning, and visibility that makes their publication count beyond the book itself. For many of our authors, DreamEngine publication is the foundation from which agent representation becomes a realistic next step.

We review manuscripts from serious authors. We are selective, and that selectivity is part of what we offer - an acceptance from DreamEngine is a statement about the work.

@StoryMeBad @realdeville1963

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Two international film awards. One extraordinary WWI story. Paul Meachair's Belleau Wood is the novel behind the acclaimed screenplay.

Paul Meachair is the fiction pen name of a sports psychologist with a Ph.D. and decades working with athletes under extreme pressure. That understanding of what men endure - physically, psychologically, morally - runs through every chapter of Belleau Wood, a novel set against the Battle of Belleau Wood, 1918, one of the defining engagements of the First World War.

When Marine Liam Kierney is falsely condemned at a rigged court martial and sentenced to face a firing squad, the stakes are not abstract. Meachair writes with precision about what it costs a man to hold his dignity in the face of institutional betrayal - and what love means when time is running out.

We are proud to have published this title under the DreamEngine imprint. The story earned its recognition. It earns its readers.

Belleau Wood is available in paperback and Kindl on our website via the link in Bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

A great manuscript is not enough. It has not been enough for some time.

The honest truth about traditional publishing in 2025 is that editorial quality and agent interest are no longer the same conversation. Before most agents read your work, they will search your name. What they find - or do not find - shapes everything that follows.

At DreamEngine Publishing, we publish serious authors who understand this. Our catalogue spans literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and the kind of work that deserves more than an automated upload and a template cover. Every title we publish receives professional editing, design, and the full metadata and distribution infrastructure that places it where readers and industry professionals can find it.

But the work we are most proud of goes further than the book itself.

Our Author Mythology framework is a strategic approach to building author identity and platform that we developed precisely because generic author marketing does not work. It is specific, it is built around each individual author, and it is the reason our authors are not simply published - they are positioned.

Dr David Baboulene brings world-renowned story science expertise to every editorial partnership. Edward J Marsh brings direct publishing editorial experience and personal involvement in every project we take on.

We are selective. We publish for authors who are ready to treat publication as an investment in a long-term writing career.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

The Oasis reunion happened. The think-pieces followed. The merchandise sold out.

Paul Carroll got there first - and he did it in fiction.

Be Here Now, Carroll's second novel published by DreamEngine, imagines exactly this cultural moment: the reformed band, the eco-branding, the corporate spectacle dressed up as something meaningful. A one-off gig on a wind turbine island in the North Sea. The greenest live music event of all time. And everything that follows when the reality fails to match the brochure.

Carroll came to us with a PR career behind him, a Manchester education, and a satirist's instinct for the gap between what institutions say and what they actually do. That instinct produced Shaking Hands with Elvis - "Scandalously funny. Black Mirror eat your heart out." - and it produces something sharper still in Be Here Now.

Contemporary British satire at its most pointed. Published May 2025, available in paperback and Kindl on our website via the link in Bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

One of our authors ran away to sea before he understood why stories work. It turns out the two things are not unrelated.

Dr David Baboulene is co-founder of DreamEngine Publishing and one of the few people in the world who holds a PhD in narrative theory. He has consulted on story structure with Bob Gale (Back to the Future), Lee Child (Jack Reacher), John Sullivan (Only Fools and Horses), Willy Russell (Educating Rita), and Mark Williams (Harry Potter). He has spent decades understanding, at a scientific level, what makes a story compelling.

He also, before all of that, joined the merchant navy and travelled the world.

Those voyages became Ocean Boulevard and Jumping Ships, the two volumes of his Shipboard Adventures series. Described as "one of the funniest books I have ever read" by City Talk and "Bryson who has really played the field" by Borders Books, the series follows David from the Southern States of America through Barbados, Jamaica, the Panama Canal, Australia, and beyond, and then across Kenya, South Africa, India, Thailand, and further still, alongside unforgettable companions Windy and NotNorman.

There is something fitting about a story scientist who built his understanding of narrative by first living a story worth telling. David did not theorise about adventure from the inside of a lecture hall. He went and had one.

Both books Available in paperback and Kindle on our website via the link in Bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

The Cartimandua Trilogy is complete.

When Tina Zee brought us the manuscript for Wild Brigantia, what struck us immediately was the clarity of her purpose: to restore one of ancient Britain's most significant and overlooked queens to the place in history she deserves. That conviction has driven every page of this trilogy, and it drives the finale just as powerfully.

Blood of Brigantia is published now. Queen Cartimandua, betrayed by her husband, besieged by Rome, and bound by the weight of her people's future, faces the choices that will define her legacy. It is the conclusion Tina's readers have been building towards since Iron Age Yorkshire first came alive on the page.

Three books. One extraordinary queen. A Yorkshire woman writing the history that was always there, waiting to be told properly.

Blood of Brigantia is available in paperback and Kindle. Available in paperback and Kindle on our website via the link in Bio.

[DreamEngine Publishing @DreamEngineuk]

Queen Cartimandua ruled Iron Age Yorkshire nearly two thousand years ago. Tina Zee has spent years making sure she is not forgotten.

We are proud to publish Tina Zee, whose Cartimandua Trilogy brings one of ancient Britain's most remarkable women back to life with the kind of depth and authority that only comes from genuine scholarship and serious storytelling.

The trilogy - Wild Brigantia, Fires of Brigantia, and Blood of Brigantia, the final instalment published this July - follows Queen Cartimandua of Brigantia through betrayal, Roman invasion, civil war, and the forging of a legacy that Tina argues still runs through the soul of the people of this land today. These are not romanticised takes on distant history. They are grounded in the real archaeology and records of Iron Age Yorkshire and Cumbria, written by a Yorkshire woman who understands her subject from the inside out.

What drew us to Tina's work was precisely that combination: the research is rigorous, the storytelling is emotionally compelling, and the female perspective at the centre of every book feels earned rather than imposed. Cartimandua is a queen forged in battle and tested by loss. In Tina's hands, she is also a mirror for every woman navigating power, loyalty, and self-belief today.

Blood of Brigantia is available now in paperback and on Kindle. If you are arriving late to the trilogy, Wild Brigantia is the place to start.

Available in paperback and Kindle on our website via the link in Bio.