Welcome

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 Knot are 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.

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.