The Day of the Tiger
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I really never thought I'd write four collections of short stories, but many of the tales in this new book presented themselves to me from real life and begged to be written. That means that, however bizarre they may have ended up, some stories are based on events that actually happened. But which? Was it the old man who loses his shorts or the businessman who hires a private detective to bribe a politician? You know it wasn't the one about the last two people on Earth. But was it the grumpy expat planter who falls out with a visitor from home, or the woman who has always wanted to fly but doesn't quite make it? You decide. More>> Reviews>> Audiobook>> en français>> |
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Sweet Song of the Siren
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This is my third collection of short stories. Nearly all of them are set in Thailand, but that doesn't mean they are the standard Thai bar scene tales. These are the stories of a wide range of people, locals and foreigners, men and women, humans and non-humans. They are told from a variety of perspectives and, I hope, will elicit a range of emotions. Some should have you puzzled, at least for a while; many should make you smile; you might even laugh out loud; I hope that you might shed a tear at least once. More>> Reviews>> en français>> . |
Enhance Your Exports! Doing Business on Other Planets
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Business is apt to take itself rather seriously. When I was in business, even I was serious occasionally. What better vantage point from which to satirise this earnestness than another planet? In this comic novel, four human entrepreneurs travel to the Smiling Disc star system to research a book promoting exports from Earth. They find that the attitudes of business people up there are different from our own, yet strangely similar. The book goes way beyond satirising how we do business; many other sacred institutions come in for a bashing too, including religion, democracy, justice and the environmental and safety industries. More>> Glossary>> Reviews>> Audiobook>> |
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If You Can't Stand The Fun, Stay Out Of The Go-Go
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In 2010, I came to live in Thailand, settling in the east coast city of Pattaya. There's an arch over the road to Pattaya which welcomes you to 'The Extreme City'. How well this describes the place! Everything in Pattaya is taken to the limit - the spiciness of the food, the poor quality of the driving, the mysteries of Thai logic and, of course, the fun. I began writing a local newspaper column that examined aspects of life in Thailand from the point of view of an innocent (and ignorant) foreigner. This fictional character has the name Kuhn Pobaan, which translates roughly as 'Mr Househusband'. His thoughts are gathered together in this book for the first time. Blog>> More>> Reviews>> Audiobook>> |
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Mango and Sticky Rice
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This is my first collection of short stories. I enjoy story writing because it's an opportunity to experiment with different styles. And it's a chance, too, to take real events that I have observed and turn them into self-contained dramas. Because they're taken from life, most of the stories in this book are set in Thailand, or at least have a connection with the place. That doesn't mean they're all 'true'; they're not. More often than not, I'll start with some amusing scene I've observed - in a bar, say - and extrapolate from there. How did those people get to be there? What will they do next? Why? What does that tell us about our own lives? And so on. More>> en français>> |
Go-Go Girls
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Go-go girls are a bit of a Pattaya icon. They're the bar ladies who encourage you to buy drinks and subtly lighten your wallet, in the process of which you may fall ever-so-slightly in love with them. Or it could be a lot. A skilled go-go girl creates a fantasy that lasts. She convinces you that you're handsome, interesting, lovable and special. You never know, it could even be true. Limericks often celebrate old men with owls nesting in their beards. This makes the enterprise of using the medium to record the lives of Pattaya bar staff rather a risky one. This book is meant to be a sympathetic and funny portrait of the profession. I'll let you decide whether it works. More>> Reviews>> |
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Mist on the Jungle
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This is the companion volume to Mango and Sticky Rice. The stories were written more or less at the same time. Some of the same characters from Mango turn up again in this collection. I wrote the second Kress & Stein story, for example, as a deliberate means of connecting the two books together. Now I like the character so much I am tempted to resurrect Mr Kress in a third collection. The title story (and, incidentally, the cover photograph) came out of a real rainy-season journey through southern Thailand. The mist that blanketed everything seemed a suitable metaphor for a certain way of thinking that's common in these parts. More>> Reviews>> en français>> |
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Pond Life
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The idea for my first novel developed from a life-long passion for natural history, and a particular interest in, yes, pond life. What it would be like to live in another world - 'below the surface', as it were. The novel touches on this aquatic theme - the (anti) hero, Patrick, is a pond-lover as I was - but the book is really about how we live as humans. Are we really as developed and as civilised as we think we are? Have we come as far as we think we have since we, metaphorically, crawled from the slime? Or are our lives still subject to the same rules that apply below the surface of the pond? More>> Reviews>> |
Losing Yourself
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I began this second novel as something completely different from the first but soon came to realise that Losing Yourself was developing many of the themes introduced in Pond Life. The protagonist, Darry, is a diver, so we're back in the water, perhaps to examine those natural laws at first hand. Darry discovers, though, that the dangers there are of a human nature. Darry is in many ways a loser. He makes a mess of his marriage and sleep-walks into risky situations that we would like to think we'd leave well alone. Losing Yourself was an attempt to see how low he could go. And still keep a sense of humour, of course. More>> Reviews>>
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Selected Poems
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The first writing I ever took seriously was poetry. I began by sending batches of poems to the literary magazines in Britain and Ireland and they started to be accepted for publication in about 1968. Two slim volumes of poetry followed. The first, The Nightowl's Dissection, was published in 1975; the second, Survivors, came out five years later. I was a schoolteacher at the time. For the next 30 years I wrote very few poems. I had to earn a living and writing poems isn't a good way to do this. Selected Poems is really a 'best of' collection of poetry from the two published books, together with a small number that came later. More>> Audiobook>>
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The Nightowl's Dissection
This was my first full collection of poems, published in 1975 and still available as a Penguin paperback. At the time it was published, I was in my last year at university, studying natural sciences. The book contains poems that I had been working on for many years. I think the oldest ones were written when I was about 16 or 17. For this reason, many of the poems possess a naivety which you might find refreshing. Quite a lot of the pieces are about animals or other aspects of the natural world, reflecting my boyhood interest in nature and the zoology degree I was studying for. The collection won an Eric Gregory award in 1976.
Survivors
This was my second book of poems, first published in 1980 and still available as a Penguin paperback. It continues some of the themes of the first book, particularly the examination of nature, but introduces others, such as domesticity and, more obviously, survival. The poems were written after I had left university. I was recently married and working as a biology schoolteacher in Suffolk, in the east of England. To me, the poems read now like an autobiography of that period of my life - the places we went around East Anglia, the things we saw. Quite a few are about things that happened at the school where I taught. The book has a homely feel. As one of the poems says, we are not heroes, but survivors.