[3] Written after the success of his first book, The Restraint of Beasts, brought him into the media limelight, Three to See the King started out in part as a "project" to prove to himself that he could be a full-time writer.

[4] The book was so successful that reviews appeared in The Guardian, The Spectator and The Independent, and it has been translated into both German as Zum König!

[5] The nameless narrator lives in an isolated tin house situated on a windswept sandy plain, miles from his nearest neighbours whom he meets infrequently.

He is quite happy in his lonely self-sufficiency until unexpectedly a woman, Mary Petrie, comes to live with him.

Then news comes of a new community being established on the edge of the plain by a charismatic, yet enigmatic figure who is digging a canyon and gaining more and more followers to his revolutionary cause.