Yaad, the Girl With No History

It’s 1987. Namo, the politically active bookseller, is preparing to save his marriage after his wife left to stay at her mum’s after an argument. Nazdar is at home, preparing for her wedding which will be taking place in her home village the next day. Friba, the pregnant Peshmerga, is on her way to the city’s hospital, together with her husband. They don’t know one another, but destiny will bring them together.

Sarwar Joanroy follows the fates of these people from the moment their daily lives are interrupted and they end up in the desert.

The novel is a journey through the black pages of the history of the Kurds in Iraq, before the invasion of the United States. Yaad, the girl with no history makes you face the facts about what Saddam Hussein’s regime did to the country and its citizens. It makes you understand why this country is still in turmoil, even today. Sarwar Joanroy based the events in his book on true events, some of which he experienced himself.

Yaad, the girl with no history is a story that is as moving as it is fascinating and educational.

Wrecked

Harrison King is convinced that he does not have a problem with alcohol, despite the fact people often tell him that he drinks too much and he often gets himself into awkward situations after a few drinks.
When his girlfriend leaves him because she thinks he is an alcoholic, Harrison sets out to prove to her and to everyone else, that he is completely non-dependent and that he is a highly functioning and responsible adult. He quickly realises that he might be drinking a little too regularly, but he is adamant that he is not an alcoholic.
Wrecked follows Harrison and his struggles with his career that he hates, his boss that he hates even more and his battle with his control over his consumption. Harrison drinks when he has a bad day at work, when he cannot decide what to do with his life, when he is stressed and as a way of dealing with social interactions.

As Harrison continues with his journal, he questions his life choices, tries to expand his social circle and put more effort into a plan for his future. But his drunken antics keep getting him into increasingly uncomfortable situations.

Woodstock Road

Tom Cassogen (Cass) leaves home in Ireland in the late 1960s to join an old school friend in London. He is soon immersed in the drifting hippy culture of the time and through trial and tribulation, love and free living, forgets his childhood of poverty and abuse. His love for Celia drives him on as he evolves from a soft boy into an experienced young man. His journey through flatland London revolves around a wide range of interesting characters and events. It is a story of the 1960s, of growing up, of searching for meaning and identity in a fluid world of love and ecstasy, of pain and sadness, and mostly of the resilience of youth.

With Love from Your Friends

This is the story of a young chap that simply thrives on the title of being a ‘complex individual’. He belongs to a spectrum of unique difficulties in which he will only ever feel at one with his own existence. He only shares this situation with a handful of friends.

But wait, there is nothing typical about this bunch that is kept locked away for the purpose of one young man’s version of a five rainy minutes, as mother nature intends to weave her marvel. But is this maverick builder truly in control within his own world as he roams the pathways upon an undecided destiny? Only one way to find out.

Unwelcome Legacies

Fragilities exist in all families, but some families are much more fragile than others…

For a quarter of a century, Anna Johnson went about her life believing that she had gotten away with her affair with Bill Williams. However, when he dies and leaves a small fortune to the younger of her two sons, the money and other dark secrets lay bare the fragility of her own family as members start to lose sight of all common decency.

By definition a legacy is a gift of property or money left to someone in a will. In the broader sense it can also be something received or transmitted from the past. Anna has made nothing in the way of any financial gain, but the legacies of her past are revealing themselves thick and fast – threatening to destroy her marriage, her family, and her whole life.

Unlikely Destinies

As part of a small Australian military group three sisters of immigrant parents participate in secret missions to counteract People’s Republic of China coercion and planned terrorist attacks in the Indo-Pacific. The sisters enjoyed a happy but meagre childhood in a remote West Australian township from where they emerged as the fortuitous beneficiaries of a private school education in South Australia. They displayed exceptional talents in standard and elective subjects. As young adults they excelled in tertiary education and gained degrees in linguistics, admiralty and Pacific constitutional law, pure mathematics, and computer science before coming to the attention of Australian intelligence agencies and the military. They were recruited by the military group for clandestine assignments that ranged from the outer boundaries of the South China Sea to Papua New Guinea and in between. The main parts of the story are about these assignments.

Under the Shade of the Mango Tree

Inaya – the daughter who knows her father to be dead.

Imaad – the son who has persistently betrayed and disappointed his father.

Zahra – in search of the man who saved her childhood and protected her mother.

Salmaan – An autistic youngster who finds it difficult to navigate himself in the big, wide world.

Today.

Inaya – The news of her father being alive shatters her existence completely as she is left with an air ticket and a damning decision. 

Salmaan – Her brother, autistic and confused escapes through an unlocked front door and discovers a world that is cruel and far from safe.

Imaad – A drug dealer on the brink of uncertainty drowning in a sea of betrayal and animosity.

Zahra – Finders not keepers of the man who changed her life and future.

Then, one moment, a fatal incident rips their souls apart and transforms their landscapes forever.

Under the Desert Sands

On honeymoon, an archaeologist couple, Toby and Lucy, meet an emergency on Lake Nasser. A man, Hassan, was being attacked by a crocodile. Can they rescue him? Will he survive?

Leaving the lake for the Western Desert and its oases. They go to Kharga and have a wonderful party. A fantasia entertains them with whirling dervishes, Nubian dancers and pipes of hashish being handed around. Then back on to the White Desert, a “Wonder of the World”. They get stuck in the deep sand and freeze in the cold night; dug out, a surprise in the hole left by their rear wheel.

Is it what they hope? Is it part of a temple? Is it an archaeologist’s dream or just a lump of stone?

Lucy bewitches a colonel in the Baharyah Oasis; he brings manpower to raise the block. Suddenly, the edge of the deep trench crumbles and sand and rubble collapse into the hole. What will become of the young couple?

Two Watches

“My second watch. I want it back now,” he said to me on the phone. No greeting, straight into it.

He ended the call soon after. I hung up and was quite distressed. His confusion was getting worse. Was this the onset of dementia? Would I ever have a proper conversation with him again?

This was the last conversation Will had with his father James. While it made no sense at the time, a chance discovery made while cleaning out his father’s apartment opened up a whole new part of James’s life that Will had not known, filled with adventure and new relationships.

From Lithuania in 1991, and the backdrop of ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Vilnius, we travel with Will all the way to the present day through his own family’s history as he learns more about his father and in turn, more about their own relationship. 

Turn A Blind Eye

When Craig Walters discovers his widowed mother is dying, he puts his dreams on hold and accepts a position at a small private bank in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia. For Craig, the steady income offers a chance to regroup. However, his indoctrination into the banking world quickly deteriorates when believing he’s stumbled upon an elaborate fraud scheme. His covert digging into the bank’s files for confirmation promptly sets off alarm bells that reverberate around the globe and unwittingly lays bare a more in-depth, sinister plot.

Linking Melbourne with modern-day Irish politics, and the unlimited power and reach of the Vatican, an intricate web of corruption and unbridled greed is spun, that entwines all that come in contact.

And whether to Turn a Blind Eye becomes a matter of life and death.

Truth Will Find a Way

Set in Mayfair, West London, Truth Will Find a Way finds a group of friends whose private lives are as unconventional as those of the Bloomsbury Set. The group’s lynchpin, Lady Monica Montford, runs the Gayton Art Gallery, a central meeting place for the friends when they visit the capital. The interweaving of their personal relationships is as complex as a game of chess; will they all remain on good terms?

Truth and Debris

In 1968 the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring, with an opening of minds and actions, was suppressed by an authoritarian regime. In Truth and Debris, a Czech psychologist escapes from suppressed Czechoslovakia and becomes a psychologist in a Canadian school. After years of work in Canada she uses recollections of her work with children, and her own childhood memories, to dig for the few shining truths in the twisted debris of her past. Can we all imagine truths lifted from the debris of the Czech invasion being of value during the current invasion of the Ukraine? Are values, deeply hidden below debris, important for our current, general, concern for a few foundational, shining and shared, truths?