Casey Norgrove grew up in County Cork where a childhood spent poring over dusty atlases and secondhand history paperbacks grew into a lifelong fascination with the moments when empires buckle under their own weight. That fascination eventually turned toward nineteenth-century China, and in particular the Taiping Rebellion - a conflict Norgrove has come to regard as one of history's most staggering and least understood catastrophes. Drawing on years of independent research into missionary archives, military memoirs, and court records, Norgrove writes narrative history aimed at readers who want scholarship without the jargon and drama without the distortion. When not buried in nineteenth-century source material, Norgrove can usually be found walking the Burren or arguing, unsuccessfully, that history is more thrilling than fiction. Norgrove currently lives and writes on the west coast of Ireland.