A Life of Breath

Jamie is a respiratory doctor working on the front line. After 12 months without catching the illness himself, he finally gets infected from an unlikely source.

He struggles to come to terms with his own first experiences of the breathlessness that has been the focus of his working life. He also has to reflect on his own potential mortality. Neither are a comfortable ride.

He has had a hugely successful 35-year career, which has taken him to the very top of his specialist field. At the same time, we meet the shy, gauche, and naïve first year doctor, who could never imagine, the achievements ahead. We read the disastrous, humorous, and unbelievable escapades, which mould his career, whilst realising that a successful personal life does not necessarily match, that of the career

The author believes the public has fallen out of love with their medical professionals and in writing this part biography, part fictional account of one doctor’s story, he hopes to put this right. You should laugh, cry and cringe in approximately equal doses, but you might not be able to look your own doctor squarely in the eye, with quite the same perspective, again.

A Ha’penny Will Do

Love, dreams and destitution.

Three members of one family are linked by their struggle to survive poverty and war at the turn of the century.

Kate, a homesick, lonely Irish immigrant, dreams of being a writer. After difficult times in Liverpool, she comes to London looking for a better life. Hoping to escape from a life of domestic service into marriage and motherhood, she meets charming rogue, William Duffield. Despite her worries about his uncertain temperament, she becomes involved with him. Will it be an escape or a prison?

Fred is a restless elder son, devoted to his mother yet locked in a tempestuous relationship with his father. War intervenes and he secretly signs up to serve abroad. Is his bad reputation deserved? What will become of him?

Joe, too young to sign up for WW1, is left to endure the hardships of war on the home front and deal with his own guilt at not being able to serve. He starts an innocent friendship with his sister-in-law which sustains him through hard times. Will he survive the bombs, the riots, the rationing and find true love in the end?

These are their intertwined and interlocking stories told through the medium of diaries, letters and personal recollections, based on the author’s family history covering the period of 1879–1920. The truth is never plain and rarely simple.

A Frame of Mind

In a world where all is not as it appears to be, it is time to take off the blinkers and embark upon a cerebral journey through fractured minds and augmented realities in a tale of suburban survival. Chronicling more than fifty years of history, fates collide, presentiments are realised and prophesies foretold in a gripping and intense narrative revealing the interdependencies which are often hidden within the roots of the human condition.

A Fine Line

A story of the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.

Set between Victorian Liverpool and Dundee and the battlefields of the First World War, three families face the perils of life on the economic cliff-edge, where a single misstep can send lives plunging out of control.

Crossing a century of dramatic change, their journey begins in the aftermath of the slave trade, moving through the era of Empire expansion and Industrial Revolution to a time of religious strife and global conflict.

The world they navigate is one fraught with hazard in which exploitation, zealotry and violence lead to rape, prostitution, fraud, and murder.

At its heart, two indomitable women – lifelong friends – choose very different paths as they strive to hold their worlds together, and to survive.

500 Days

How different could the world have been, then and now, if lead-ups and events surrounding the Second World War had occurred vastly differently? What if different alliances had been formed through dramatic circumstances and, subsequently, the tyrants had been unable to wield their evil powers?

In the latter half of the 1930s, Russia and Germany are going through the motions of getting on well with each other until a series of “events” occur. A spectacular explosion kills many fascists including Hitler and the Russians decide to seize the moment and invade. Britain and France declare war on Russia and become allied to a Germany under new leadership. There are more shocks when Stalin disappears just when the Russians seem on the brink of success.

Germany, however, has a great deal of support and there are great sea powers, especially Britain, who begin to demonstrate their vast reach. One of the smallest navies in existence also has a big say in subduing a mighty power.