Falling Behind

Do you really know the person you have committed the rest of your life to? Are they the same person you married, once knew, or have you ignored those subtle changes and made compromises just for the sake of happily ever after? Perhaps it is you who has changed, and now everything you once cherished, once hoped for, does not bind you in the way that it once did.

Against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, Beth, and her husband Jake, travel to Samoa to reset and mend a broken marriage. But the suspicion of an affair, an addiction, a crime, or the thought that he just does not want to be around her anymore, travel with her to this island paradise.

How does it feel to lose a child? Your children are not supposed to leave you before you leave them. How do you live in a vacuum, unable to breathe, when sleep and inevitable death are the only reprieve? And then, what happens when you are responsible for their death? An old man and women, isolated from the rest of the world, abandoned by their families and neighbours, grapple with grief.

Falling Behind is a collection of six short stories that explores the character of grief and its manifestation in people and how these very same people attempt to ride it out and hope, at the same time, for it to end. As with Leaving Behind, each story bears an unexpected twist.

Falling Leaves

The driving force of this book is the author’s lifelong fascination with human nature. Forty years in the law brought him into contact with a broader cross-section of society than most people would normally experience, or even wish to, and it is their strengths and weaknesses, values and doubts that shaped these poems.

The majority of these poems were written well into the author's retirement. As we know, the ageing process involves a shift in values, priorities and challenges. He faces these head on: dementia, faith, physical decline, even falling in love. Nothing is spared.

A word of caution. Many of the poems are simple and straightforward. And why not? Poetry is for everyone. Some appear simple and straightforward but have a twist or secondary current below the surface. Look out for them. In others the author sets out his views and throws down a gauntlet. In doing so he commits the cardinal sin of the modern age: he asks us to think.

Family Business

Family Matters

Kimberley Weatherby leads a privileged if rather boring existence with her well-to-do family on the Isle of Man. Her long-time boyfriend has left her. Then two men enter her life: a gorgeous newcomer to the island and a mysterious foreign stranger. Unfortunately, it was the one she doesn’t want that proposes marriage. Meantime she has to navigate some challenging personal relationships.

There are her best friends: Lisa, caring but overemotional and Julie, an ambitious single mother with an eye on the financial aspects of life. Then her immediate family presents multiple challenges. Her widowed stepmother, Irene, is demanding and bitter. Older brother Richard is exasperatingly dull, if diligent. And younger brother Bob is full of youthful exuberance and always getting into harmless scrapes – or are they?

Her romantic dilemma is quickly overshadowed by a dramatic and tragic event which exposes the secrets of everyone. Reeling from shock she must find the strength to resolve a dangerous situation and deal with repercussions that affect everyone around her.

Far From Worries

A couple of years ago, the author moved next door to the King of Thailand working as an editor of an online magazine published in Hua Hin, a seaside town. At the time, the king lived there permanently in his summer palace known in Thai as the Klang Kangnon palace, which delightfully translates as ‘Far from Worries’. The book is a chronicle of the author’s year there, but in a larger sense, it is a portrait of contemporary Thailand; part memoir, part history and part travel book.

Farewell Chapelon

When the cargo ship Chapelon is ordered to sail from her home port of Dunkirk just two days before Christmas, her crew is less than pleased. Not only were their hopes of celebrating with their loved ones wrecked, they also knew they were about to sail into rough and turbulent seas.

In a storm of unprecedented fury that is encountered off the north-east coast of England, the ship experiences an engine room explosion that leaves her disabled and at the mercy of the furious wind blowing her towards the shore. Efforts to find a tug to assist Chapelon prove to be fruitless and a life boat and helicopter that are dispatched to aid the distressed ship and rescue her crew themselves become overwhelmed in the atrocious conditions being experienced.

When Chapelon’s grounding becomes an obvious and imminent certainty, her crew’s very survival becomes reliant upon a local coastguard coming up with a last-ditch plan.

Fast Fashion and Flaneurs

Bill Wonder, the tyrannical billionaire fashion tycoon is found splattered on the pavement outside his fashion school in the West End of London.

Was he pushed from the balcony, did he jump, or it could have happened because of his high heel shoes?

The mystery of his death is stitched together by Sadie Silver, a hapless fashion history teacher, who needs to understand the incident to uncover her family’s sartorial secrets.

But wait, could she have killed Bill? 

After all, she was the last person to see Bill alive, and he really seemed to hate her new look.

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.

Father God's Great Big Beautiful Secret

We have all seen beautiful Christmas cards and most of us have sung carols during the Christmas season, which depict pretty nativity scenes of Mary and Joseph with baby Jesus in a stable, in Bethlehem, beneath a brilliant star, surrounded by shepherds and three richly robed wise men. However, there are some differences between the traditional nativity scenes and how the event is depicted in the Biblical account. Were there really shepherds and Magi present together surrounded by curious animals and overlooked by an extraordinary star and multiple angels? What do the disciples say in their accounts? Some do not cover the birth of Jesus at all but the disciple we know as Luke has recorded it as it was told to him by Mary, mother of Jesus. Here we look more closely at Luke’s account and think about what happened from Father God’s perspective.

Fact check at Luke 2:8-20.

Feathered Friends

Imagine what could have happened if four birds had decided to go on the adventure of their lifetime. Especially if not everything goes according to the plan! They will not only make new friends on their way but encounter a few dark characters too.Will they come back home safe? Will they learn and discover few things about each other?The feathered friends spread their wings and soar through Europe making the old saying ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’ a reality.Let’s go on the adventure to discover beautiful landscapes and places from the bird’s eye view.

Feed the Fire

Feel The Pull. Answer The Call.

Anya, a young woman who keeps to the shadows, is drawn out into the light and learns the hard way that magic can never really die. Her days of thieving turns into a fight for survival.

James, an older man with a bad leg, passes the time tending to the sick and wounded. Some people see him as a saint, others whisper about darker secrets he holds.

Runa is haunted by her past with Anya. One choice Runa made drove them apart. She now works for one of the gangs in the Capitol, just trying to keep one step ahead of the Capitol guard.

Inara is a bright and upcoming guard; she is driven by a deep sense of right and wrong. But is it possible to hold on to morality in the face of destiny?

The Capitol is divided, the west side is filled with the rich and privileged. The east side is filled with the poor and forgotten. The Castle with the King stands in its middle.

Magic will come at a price… one they might not be willing to pay.