Eke the Echidna

What is an echidna? Is it a hedgehog? An anteater? Some kind of walking potato? Follow your field guide Eke as he traipses through the Australian bush and demonstrates some of the wonderful characteristics of these unusual Australian animals. Just please avoid being distracted by platypuses… they love the attention.

El Capitano Karen in the Covid Crusade

This story features El Capitano Karen, the big mumma chicken, and her chicken friends Gertrude, Donavan and Rodrigo in a fun and colourful illustration of chicken life.

It is a story about the importance of spreading love and kindness in our community in the face of adversity.

This book is dedicated to the many children across the world that have experienced hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elephant on Main Street

This is this story of Eamon, a little boy growing up in Northern Ireland in the sixties, before he succumbed to Leukaemia, a few months short of his seventh birthday. The book describes specific aspects of his short but remarkable life, all written from his perspective. Each chapter has a footnote which charts the history of the conquest of childhood leukaemia which commenced during his lifetime. The book is based around actual events and things which Eamon said and did which have been passed down. Eamon has the benefit of perspective, so he can describe events that have yet to happen which have a bearing on the life of his family.

Enlightened Living: A Book of Being

Have you ever wondered about how best to live your life? Religions claim to have answers, but they are couched in faith and constrained by rituals that make each religion different from the next. The inevitable result has been conflict and war. Enlightened Living is neither religious nor spiritual, offering instead a rational and practical path that is available to everyone. Enlightenment isn’t found by austerity or following rituals but by the sustained practice of observing attachments and letting them go.

Escape to Dorland

Have you ever doubted yourself? You are not alone…

Daisy and Margot return in a new adventure that will test their confidence and strength.

When tragedy befalls the fairy kingdom, Daisy is wracked with guilt as she tries to help her fairy friends. Margot, meanwhile, finds herself in a position she never could have imagined, with a responsibility she is unsure she can handle. With the help of the young girl and those around her, she must conquer her insecurities to protect her kind.

Events unfold, bringing an even greater challenge, which the pair must tackle to avoid a dreaded consequence.

Will they have the time and ability to be triumphant?

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from My Houseplants

Life is a journey and finding our place in that life can feel overwhelming. Who am I? Where do I belong? How do I cultivate a life that makes my heart happy?

“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” ― Lao Tzu

While there are many books written on self-discovery, Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from My Houseplants is unique in its approach by using the growth cycle and care of houseplants to impart wisdom and essential life lessons for living an authentic life.

Throughout the book, the author’s own journey of personal growth unfolds alongside practical information and care tips for raising happy, healthy houseplants. While this little book tackles some tough topics, such as her struggle with depression and experience in an abusive relationship, it is done with a lightness and humour that makes you feel like you’ve known the author for years.

This book will leave you feeling inspired and ready to change and improve your own life, as well as those of your houseplants.

Evolution: The Pattern

The origin of life is the fusion of two slightly different halves: fusion-fission, fusion-fission, fusion-fission… the rhythm of Life. In the beginning of all beginnings, an energetic proton and neutral neutron had fused into one whole. On planet Earth, the fusion took monumental proportions until the mating ritual has reached the highest conceivable degree. Love has a power to create life but also has a power to destroy it if its integrity is violated. Psychopath-men attack women, psychopath-women attack own children while breast, prostate and colorectal carcinomas are responsible for more than 20% human deaths whose incidence in great apes is less than 2%. Are humans on the decline? To find out this we have to unravel the mystery of the origin of life. Only if the sequence of the events in the story of life is correct, a pattern will emerge.

Exploitation

Exploitation is an unceasingly fast-paced, action-packed, graphic, and red-hot account of one man’s battle to cauterise the human trafficking money flow from infectious criminal organisations as they tirelessly replicate and engage in barbarous internecine warfare.

It is narrated by the controversial, yet – mostly – justified, protagonist, who solely gets his hands bloodied – sometimes regrettably – as an assassin for a Russian crime family in order to gather intelligence on their human trafficking operations.

Round after round of being bludgeoned, hunted, manipulated, and lied to takes its toll on the narrator. This forces him to grow increasingly reliant on his knowledge, wit, and resourcefulness, as well as his own professional network.

If you commit a crime, he will be understanding. If you have any involvement in human trafficking, he will be ruthless.

Exploitation

In Exploitation, readers are taken on a heart-wrenching journey through the mind and experiences of a frontline soldier. Through intense and extreme pressure, the soldier must navigate their way through the challenges of combat and emerge on the other side. With raw and emotional storytelling, this book offers a unique insight into the thoughts and actions of those on the front lines, leaving readers with a deeper understanding of the challenges and sacrifices of military service.

Faerie Tale

When the forest fairies notice the changes in the forest, the Oracle declares that they must recover the four fairy treasures from the elemental fairies;

“The darkness that has grown for many years,
the terror that every fairy fears.
But with the fairies’ growing plight,
hope is returned by a single light.
One chance we have to correct this wrong,
this hope will need to grow strong.
Because if the four races cannot unite,
the one will fail in the final fight.
You will need the earth’s wisdom to have its say,
You will fail without a flame to guide your way,
You need the air’s knowledge that is kept
You will fail without the water’s emotional depth.
These four elements are needed for all fairies’ creation,
to twist them is the darkness’s motivation.
To stop it collect the Tuatha De Danann’s four treasures,
even though the darkness will try to stop these measures.”

The Oracle sees that Elizabeth is the only fairy with a chance. The Dark Fairy tries to thwart their friendship and collection of the treasures, even invading their dreams with pixie magic.

Meeting friends along the journey and gaining wisdom from the elemental races, Elizabeth learns the true meaning of being a fairy. Can Elizabeth and her friends collect the treasures, unite the races and defeat the dark fairy to save the forest?

Fastovski's Tales of Hampstead

Imagine that Isaac Babel’s Cossacks wassail together with Runyonesque Liverpool Jews outside the plate-glass window of a Hampstead café where a Klezmer band is playing to a packed and tea-drinking congregation of jazzmen, Hasidic scholars, surrealists, old soldiers, and retired strippers; and you have the tone and temperature of this unique and unclassifiable memoir – no, not memoir, more a stream-of-consciousness novella – no, not a novella but a piece of autobiographical fiction – no, not autobiography but a picaresque drama conquered from the unreliable and fertile brain of the eponymous Fastovski.

And who is Fastovski? Is he real or invented? Is he perhaps the alter-ego of real-life jazz pianist, Klezmer swinger, big band leader and flaneur, Wallace Fields, who stares at us from the book’s frontispiece in shades, Diaghilev coat and moustache, over a cup of strong black coffee? Fastovski’s not telling and anyway, who cares.

This is a book to be devoured, disseminated, denounced, and delighted in. It belongs to all who think art and life are one and that the Arch-Savant of Canterbury, Issy Bonn, Rashid the Manic Berber Chef of NW3, and Mrs Karl Popper, have an equal claim on history. I haven’t had such a good time since I shared Sir Ralph Richardson’s motorbike with a parrot and a striking grandmother clock.

Piers Plowright
August 2008

Fate and The Lady

Fate and the Lady follows the modern day story of district nurse Christina Wise and her chance meeting with enigmatic ex-quarryman Mercy Slaughter and his friend FJ.

Christina will be tested in her feelings for this man and his obsessive need to right a wrong committed against himself and his friends during a medieval battle re-enactment only a couple of years previously. His compulsion risks putting them all in mortal danger and even result in an international incident.

Will Christina be able to save Slaughter from himself, or will he continue in his path of self-destruction?

Add to the mix a French politician and his sidekick with an axe to grind; a hardcore group of Englishmen with vengeance in mind; and a mysterious Turkish billionairess with her own designs on Slaughter; and you end up with a volatile mix of sex, intrigue and bloody hand-to-hand combat.