My new book. Only a few more months to go.

The first of April 2019 marked one year since I started work on my new book. It's unlike anything else I've ever published as it follows nine men, each from his boyhood to manhood; it's like nine novels in one. It's probably going to be titled The Boys and Men of Auckland's Mickey Rooney Gang. I've even drafted the blurb (although that could and probably will change).

The Boys and Men of Auckland's Mickey Rooney Gang. 

It was at the Point, a working class suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, in nineteen fifty-seven, that eight mildly rebellious boys, in the middle of their adolescence, and frustrated by the conservatism of their cautious elders, were attracted to the charismatic but delinquent Mickey Rooney and so joined his little gang. But later, after an especially unpleasant practical joke – a nasty trick – played by Mickey Rooney on Pearly Gates, the gang broke up. The hapless Pearly Gates was the gang’s most vulnerable member, despite his size and strength, and the others came to be utterly ashamed of their participation in his humiliation. The gang disintegrated then when each of the boys, angry with himself, with nothing in common with the others but his sex, age and place of residence, and confused, as all adolescent males are, by his inner turmoil – went his own way.

This book follows each of them into adult-hood and, for those who survived, into old age. Nine lives. Nine stories. Nine men with nothing in common but the adolescent year they wasted in Auckland’s Mickey Rooney gang.