Bonfire Night

A bonfire blazes in Outback Australia. Two men sit all night in its glow, commemorating their dead friend. He blew his head off with a shotgun. Bonfires burn across Lewes, England, commemorating Guy Fawkes Night. As crowds of revellers lurch through the streets, a boy stands teetering on the ledge of a bridge, waiting for the train to pass below. Two different lives, two different places, one story to tell.

Blood in the Snow

A young woman stands in the snow, holding a small child in her arms. She implores the passing lorries to take the child. A shot rings out; the woman’s final thought is that her little girl is safe. Yana grows up in a happy household in England but, in her teens, determines to go back to Serbia to find her roots. The family reluctantly support her wishes. Michael; his wife, Sue; and their three children play an integral part in the story and help her come to terms with her background, which ultimately touches all their lives.

Beyond the Division

Pilsung and Soon are star-crossed lovers. He is from South Korea, and she is from the North. Their love is so forbidden that when Pilsung tells his boss, she is immediately worried about the police finding out.

Soon escapes from North Korea after the shutdown of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and plans to fake her own death with the help of a police officer in South Korea. Pilsung is out of the loop and spends most of the story looking for his love, not realizing she is supposed to be dead.

Soon has been watching Pilsung’s every move, waiting for the right time to reveal herself, only to be heartbroken when she misunderstands a close bond between friends. She decides to leave him, but Pilsung flies to Yanbian to look for her and attempts to smuggle himself into North Korea.

Before The Pearly Gates

Miles Appleby is a complicated and tormented soul. A successful oral surgeon at an exclusive practice in Chicago, he has always been driven by the high expectations of his father. Increasingly, he feels isolated and slowly comes to the realization that he leads an empty life. Miles, however, carries a secret that involved a woman who Bill, his close friend, had been seeing shortly before he suddenly left his homeland for another life in London.

Ever plagued by relationships that fail, Miles meets an engaging woman, Juanita, who finally ignites something in his life giving him warmth and meaning. In a strange turn of events while attending Bill’s untimely funeral near London, he gains a different perspective as to why certain events unfolded, and the secret that Miles had been so careful to protect is slowly revealed by a person called Laura. As the story reaches its zenith, the stories of these four characters finally become pieced together.

Beaten at Birth

Precious, the oldest of ten suffered all of her life. Her biggest fear of landing in a care home had now become true. All of her belongings were thrown in the rubbish, along with all of her memories. A stroke that was not treated, due to misconduct, had left her with slight dementia. The system was prepared to pay £900 a week for a care home she didn’t want to be in. She would have been better off in prison, at least you get parole in prison. The care home had thrown away the key. Her siblings and son had tried in vain to get her out, but her oldest daughter and granddaughters were insistent that she stay there, so they could get on with their dubious business.

Baz, Ant and the Boys

The summer started with ‘Brown Sugar’ and it ended with The Who at The Oval cricket ground, where they turned live rock music into a mesmerizing, pulsating miracle. And bound up in this heady atmosphere of 1971 was the pure, unadulterated love of football and all its absurdities, where sex, snakebite and the slide tackle scythed their way through everything.

Shortfall College, a gaunt and brooding building, reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution cut a dark slice of shadow across the South London sky. It was here that an oddball, dotty selection of students set out in search of the Holy Grail – the South London Intercollegiate Cup – aided by spurious tactics and hindered by countless distractions.

From Marlene, the landlord’s wife, a goddess and vixen with a predilection for ice who couldn’t keep her hands off Baz, to Norman, a ringer, with a rather unhealthy lopsided grin who completely snapped when trying to remove an opponent’s ear with his teeth.

Driven ever onwards by The Bear, their captain and inspiration, and Baz, his defensive henchman, they try to rein in the Ant, who possesses the aerodynamics of a spear and a footballing philosophy whereby the ball isn’t absolutely necessary.

all things must pass

all things must pass is the story of Martin Wilson – a disturbed youth with a penchant for knives, Bruce Lee, and samurai films. Martin scours the streets of Chelsea for victims and lives in a fantasy world which he filters through his hyperactive imagination. At one moment Martin is Zorro, leaving his mark as a warning to his enemies; in the next, he has transformed into a rhinoceros charging at the plate glass window of an antique shop. But beneath the hard surface of this wild young man, there is a quieter and more thoughtful person struggling to be heard. When Martin is moved from a safe house in London to an institution in the countryside, he finds himself at odds with his new surroundings. He has a lot of growing up to do and life is lurking in the wings to trip him up and teach him some hard lessons. Martin does return to London eventually and it is here that Cupid’s arrow pierces his armour, turning his world upside down. The transformation wrought in his heart and soul sets him on the road to acceptance and maturity.

Alba Regained

Frustrated equally by misrule at Westminster and the Scottish government’s failure to progress the independence agenda, a reinvigorated Scottish National Liberation Army seizes power from Scotland’s ruling party, the SNP, after a campaign of attrition during the 2020s. This tale follows the adventures of two young revolutionaries as they pursue their patriotic goal whilst struggling to understand their own personal and philosophical commitment to the cause.

With the effects of climate change now moving into a series of extreme weather events, normal life is so disrupted that unnatural (some would say magical) events appear almost as everyday occurrences, until eventually the human turmoil and the weather disruption come together in a dramatic conclusion that puts into question the singularity of the human experience.

Acres of Diamonds

The title gives nothing away, but it may provoke your curiosity and interest and not a novel to be ignored. The very idea of three university undergraduates planning a daring diamond robbery beggar’s belief; especially when one considers that they are in their final year.

Were these questions asked by the three students of themselves? Their conclusion: we are clever enough to commit the perfect crime, with no one any the wiser. But as we all know, things in life are never that simple or as straightforward, and the most unlikely turn of events turns up!

Rather than let the cat out of the bag by describing the course of events and the unexpected outcome, it is left to you, the reader, to find out what happened to our thrill-seeking trio in their ingenious adventure. It is an easy and thoroughly entertaining yarn.

A Shoelace, a Paper Clip and a Pencil

Tom Cooper, a university senior academic, is on holiday in the south of France with his wife, Liz. Whilst having early evening drinks with the owners of the beautiful eighteenth-century small chateau where they are staying, he relates two strange incidents in which he was involved earlier in his life – one in Bonn in the mid-70s and the other in Belfast in the mid-80s. Having always thought these incidents were completely unrelated, comments by Dann – one of the owners and a former international journalist – lead him to consider that they may be, after all, connected in some way, especially given that Tom was the virtual double of a known provisional IRA activist. Tom and Liz start a new journey in their life, trying to piece together the links, at first focusing on the contents of the briefcase left with Tom in Bonn. What unfolds is a chain of events which eventually threaten Tom's life as well as Liz's. Newly-made friends are not who they seem to be and they encounter more strange and dangerous, episodes as they pursue the truth about those events. Someone, or some people do not want them to discover that truth and try everything to ensure they don't. From being hunters, Tom and Liz are now the hunted. They wonder if this nightmare will ever come to an end.

A Shadowed Dawn

Everybody felt a kind of chill and body aches. This felenza was something the white man had shot into the air, though everybody wondered why within days men started dropping down dead on their farms. The strong man of Gonzo, Juba, was one of the first to go under.

A Leaf in the Stream

Argentina 1964: the Perons have all been ousted by the army which is trying to govern in the face of a rising tide of hostility leading to strikes and civil disobedience. The army reacts in the only way it knows with kidnappings, secret imprisonment and murder of its enemies. (The ‘Desaparecidos’) Conscripted into National Service, Juan Garcia steps into this unknown world. His mother cautions him not to get involved but he enjoys the army and is soon involved with the Gestapo-like tactics of the Pumas. His development and final extrication from this secret world form the basis of this exciting book.