Chris Heal’s latest book, released in June 2026, is Lion Man, a novel about good and evil, the last of his hospital trilogy.
Heal travelled as a nomad around the world and lived in several countries, working for multinationals and running his own businesses. He retired for the fifth time and completed a PhD at Bristol University when he was sixty-five-years-old. His academic work received many awards and was reviewed as ‘first-rate, well-written with immensely impressive scholarship’. He then started a new career as a full-time writer. He now lives in Hampshire, UK.
Heal’s subjects are eclectic, usually a fresh and deeply researched outlook on an aspect of world or local history or a part fictional adventure in a troubled modern setting. He draws heavily on his own experiences and regularly questions popular moral positions. It is also often difficult to know where the story starts and the truth ends.
In 2025, Heal had a heart attack which left him near death. In his hospital bed, he found counting helped relieve the monotony. He plotted three books to drag himself back to the land of the living. Glimpses of the Famous and eating wildly, are autobiographical short stories of, first, his trivial meetings with 70 famous people and, second, 150 meals of different species he had eaten around the world.
The last of the trilogy, Lion Man, is a more serious archaeological mystery set among the artwork of palaeolithic caves and native tribes. The book uses hallucination and psychedelic drugs as a background for murder and seeks the origins of religion and genocide as it moves between the current day and 40,000 years ago when African Homo sapiens came upon European Neanderthals.
