Coming Soon: 'The Life Of My Stories'

 

Here it is. The Life Of My Stories. 
A brief memoir of my life with a loose emphasis on the people and events which inspired by stories and books.

Available soon from Amazon (paperback) and Kindle.   

Rejected. Again.

After writing for most of my adult life, publishing fourteen books, and receiving wonderful reader reviews from all over the world -- especially America -- I have once again been rejected by a New Zealand publisher. 

For some reason I have never been accepted by mainstream publishers in New Zealand who, unlike my readers, don't seem to see any value in genuine New Zealand fiction. The constant refrain is basically: 'You're a good writer, your book is wonderfully written, but we don't see any market in New Zealand for quality literature like this'. 

This time it's my new novel Twice Upon a Time There Lived (see previous post below) about which Bateman Books said (by way of polite rejection): "While your writing is descriptive and evocative, we feel this novel is too niche and literary for our list. It’s also hard to sell a novel about an obsessive love between cousins to a New Zealand audience." 

How do they know that?    

Coming soon. 'Once Upon a Time There Lived'.

It's been well over a year -- interrupted, unfortunately, by illness --  but my new novel Twice Upon a Time There Lived is finished and ready to go. It's with a couple of New Zealand publishers but typically they are very slow to respond. For example, Penguin says to wait up to four months which I think is both ridiculous and disrespectful. However, I've decided that in this case I'll wait as this book deserves the support only a mainstream publisher can give. But if it's eventually rejected, as all my books have been, then I'll publish myself on Amazon/Kindle and sell it in America where I always get great reviews. 

Here's the cover blurb:  

When teenaged Barbara Conwyne learns that cousins who marry risk having children with mental or physical handicaps, she fears she and her beloved cousin William will never be able to marry. The cousins, born only weeks apart, to identical twin mothers, and fathers who were brothers, are biologically closer than most cousins and therefore, believes Barbara, at even greater risk.

Despite intensely and obsessively loving only each other, Barbara’s fears blight the first part of the cousins’ lives as they go their separate ways. Only after twenty unhappy years apart does fate work to bring them together at last to live in the family home in blissful happiness.

Until fate intervenes.

AVAILABLE NOW. 'The Artist as an Old Man (Self-Portrait)'

The artist returns to Auckland 

After twenty years in London a somewhat notorious Kiwi  artist returns home when his life falls apart as a result of fraud, death and depression. The Artist as an Old Man (Self-Portrait) is a personal hour-by-hour journal of the day of his first New Zealand exhibition.

Accustomed to always being busy, the restless artist — eccentric, irritable and ageing — suddenly has nothing to do until the exhibition’s evening opening. And so we follow him and his sometimes angry and unreasonable thoughts, including lingering doubts about his own work, through the long day.

Having experienced financial relief before the exhibition, an unpleasant encounter at the exhibition, and sadness after it, he returns home at the end of the day ready to face his new life, alone and lonely, in Dunedin. 

The Artist as an Old Man (Self-Portrait) is available now from Amazon and Kindle and from my website soon. 

 

It's an Amazon #1 BEST SELLER

Yes! The Boltons of The Little Boltons is now an Amazon #1 Best Seller in 'London Travel'. For those who don't know about this book here's the cover blurb: 

  This is the story of the few months the author and his wife spent working together as servants for a wealthy old couple in their large home of faded glory in The Little Boltons, one of the most desirable addresses in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. 
  It begins by documenting their leap from the comfort and security of their New Zealand home into the bizarre world of domestic service in London. They secured a live-in position, he as the cook and she as the lady's maid, and the engaging narrative describes their duties and how they did their best to provide their eccentric employers with the quality of old-fashioned service and dining to which they were accustomed.   In the process they met an odd assortment of people, somehow connected to the running of the house, whose lives were governed by the unwritten rules of the English class system.
  It was, as the author says, a sad and somewhat surreal and shabby end of an era, unmarked by history; a metaphor for the demise of what was once the capital of the world's most powerful empire. 
  And yet it's such a charming little story. 

 

AVAILABLE NOW. The international rise and fall of an Auckland ad man

It's taken more than a year but my new novel is finished. It's called IT'S WHAT EDDIE DID. Available now from Amazon and Kindle.  

Here's the cover image and synopsis. 

From an Auckland slum to the heights of a New York boardroom and, eventually, an obscure and unhappy old age, It’s What Eddie Did records the rise and fall of Eddie Purvis, a rich and successful New Zealand advertising man, and his relationship with one of the world’s great international airlines and its New York advertising agency. However, obsessed with his own mid-life success, Eddie later discovers the importance of family, and that wealth can’t protect him and them from life’s troubles and disappointments. 

The first review of 'The Fable of Flitcroft Point is in. It's five-star. Very perceptive. And it's from Germany.

 

It says, in English (according to Herr Google): 

"The acting persons [the characters] are very lively and you feel with them. This is not just a made-up story but could have happened several times - for the Maori in New Zealand and everywhere in the world."