Please Buy our Books, Part 2

I really must make an effort and try to get some book sales, and hopefully sales for my fellow Fantastic Books authors too, as they are all so good - providing masses of good reads.  And our books, and some of our authors, will be appearing at the York Book Fair on December 6th.  

Mark Henderson who writes a lot about the Peak District will be there.  His books have taught me so much about the country of my childhood, its landscape and its legends.

He also writes some interesting fiction.  I reviewed Perilaus II in this blogpost:

https://sueknight2000.blogspot.com/2023/06/perilaus-ii-by-mark-p-henderson.html

It's a thriller, but also made me laugh. Here, for example, is the author, trapped in the world of his book, driving a strange car:

"My relationship with the Land Rover encountered teething troubles. Its controls were in unaccustomed places. An elderly Sunday driver in a hat, nodding dog in the back window, challenged my patience. Irritated by her adagio manoeuvres, I bruised my fist on a part of the steering column that was innocent of horn and then washed my windscreen at her."

This is what I have tried to do in Disraeli Hall, make it scary, but also funny. It is set in Mark Henderson territory, as Disraeli Hall is sited on the very edge of the Peak Park. 

The inspiration for the book was the lost world of Nabbs Cottage - bigged-up into Disraeli Hall -  and hopefully I conveyed something of it. The second staircase, the darkness at its foot, play a big part. But the book took off in a different direction from the one I had expected.

And as all these layers of memory change all the time as we get older and older, if I were ever to revisit the two houses of my childhood in fiction again, no doubt it would take yet another unexpected turn.

Our lives are so short now.  Our threescore years and ten go by so quickly. Didn't a poet compare it to the flight of a sparrow through the mead hall - a brief moment of warmth and light between darkness and darkness.

If we are all in the restored earthly paradise, with everlasting life ahead of us, I doubt we will want to think back too much on the tragedy we have all been living in since the loss of Eden.  But won't we be building new memories, layer upon layer, with no sadness in them, no regrets?

And how will that feel... I can't really imagine, but once again I hope so much we are all  there to find out.

Well, one bit of good health news - an increasingly rare commodity in old age. Yesterday was my 6 monthly dental check up, and my kind, if stern, dentist told me I was doing OK, and has given me some advice about regularly using a fluoride mouthwash to try to ward of the problem that my sicca (dry mouth, dry eyes) will cause, given there is no real medical answer to it.

But no dental work needed to be done.  Hurray!  Grateful for that. Very. (As Mr. Alfred Jingle might have put it.)