My website has information about myself and my books,
Mission
and
A Fool's Knot, published by
Libros International and
Andrews; and
Voyagers
my short stories on a travel theme. Mission
and A Fool's Knot are African novels set in Kenya,
East Africa. They deal
with issues of culture, religion, politics and development. They examine how
relationships between individuals and groups are created and recreated in a
society subjected to fast and radical change. Mission takes the larger view,
relating these issues to five main characters. A Fool's Knot deals in more
detail with relationships within a single family, that of a returned lawyer,
an idealist who wants to make changes of his own.
Voyagers
is a set of short stories loosely
based on a theme of travel. Stories such as Strangers, Protesters and
Initiates have been available for some time from article sites. Now the full
set is published in book form. In Brunei, a teacher discovers his future,
while an Australian couple are initiated into a new culture. Memories of
Vietnam come all the way home, while an aid worker in Sri Lanka seeks
advice. A cultural tour of Italy turns on aesthetics and a dream journey to
Turkey becomes less than wondrous. In the old Yugoslavia, a group of
explorers find that a quiet bar may contain a threat. In England, an idyllic
Devon village reveals lives less than perfect, while in London an aged
writer meets a revolutionary leader with a score to settle. And in a distant
future, but nowhere special, a traveller finds that not only luggage can go
missing.
Mission
and
A Fool’s Knotare set in Kitui District, eastern Kenya, in the
1970s. Kitui is a poor part of Kenya, a place where tourists never visit and
where most people are still involved in subsistence agriculture. Because of
the area's perennial problem with drought, however, most peasant farmers
cannot grow enough to avoid hunger.
Click here to read extracts from Mission or here to read the
first chapter of A Fool's Knot. Click
here
for the Voyagers page.
Voyagers is my latest book, a set of short stories
around a theme of travel. They are set in a variety of locations, with all,
apart from one, taking place in recent decades. Some of these stories,
Strangers,
Protesters,
Initiates and
Victims, for example, have been available
since mid-2008 as free downloads from article sites.
Martin Offiah's 50 Of The Best is
now available. I have ghosted this rugby league book with Martin for
publication on 1 October 2009. It's a personal selection of 50 of the best
ever tries in the game. Visit the
50 Of The Best page for more details.
I have been a follower of
Wakefield Trinity, aka Wildcats for many years. And I have wanted to write a
book about rugby league ever since I took a small part in the film of This
Sporting Life, Lindsay Anderson's presentation of David Storey's novel. In
one of the crowd sequences filmed in Belle Vue, Wakefield, if you squint
hard enough for the one second of the shot, you can see a ten-year-old lad
in short trousers behind the sticks at the scoreboard end. The game was
Wakefield versus Wigan in the third round of the rugby league cup in 1962,
and Richard Harris and the rest were the curtain raiser, as they tried to
film action sequences in front of that 28,000 crowd. Wakefield won 5-4, try
Smith, goal Fox, against two Griffiths penalties for Wigan. The ten-year-old
was me.
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I now live in La Nucia, near Benidorm, Costa Blanca, Spain, but was born in
Wakefield, United Kingdom, and was brought up in Sharlston and Crofton, when
they were Yorkshire mining villages.
Eventually, I will use these links to offer background to the themes
covered in Mission. Currently,
do have a look at our house!
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