REPLAY EXPO

I'm off to Blackpool tomorrow, to get ready for the R3PLAY EXPO, two days of video gaming fun. And, hopefully, selling some original art, art prints, and other branded bits and pieces of Oliver Frey's output.

The Khartoum stories

Now that Storm Over Khartoum and its sequel Avenging Khartoum are finished, I have to decide where to publish. Back to Smashwords, or go the Kindle Direct route…? At least I thought I'd show the covers, painted by Oliver Frey in the meantime.

Here are the back cover blurbs…


Storm Over Khartoum
1884 – Deep in the deserts of Sudan a crazed fanatic spawns violent bloodshed…
As members of the British force engaged in a desperate bid to save heroic Gordon of Khartoum, besieged by the frenzied armies of the Mahdi, teenagers Edgar and Rupert Clinton, twin brothers divided by a woman’s greed, unravel a past crime that threatens their futures. Separated by events, Edgar and Rupert are thrown into their own desperate adventures as the conflict rages on – and both find Muslim allies willing to risk all to see them through. In a hostile world of searing sun, sand and rocky wastes the two boys discover the wider meaning of what truly is a family.

Avenging Khartoum
1896 – In the heart of the Sudan, the Mahdiya’s cruel rule faces final retribution…

As the British and Egyptian armies under General Kitchener mount a massive campaign to free Khartoum from the fanatic Dervish forces, one young man promises his dying mother to set out and seek the truth of his long-lost father’s fate. Did he die in battle against the Mahdi’s frenzied hordes in 1882? Did he escape and survive against all odds? Sixteen-year-old Gregory Hilliard stakes his life on discovering the truth…
Born and raised in Cairo, fluent in native languages, Gregory is pitched into the heat of war as interpreter for the British command, and through battle and peril unravels a tragic and life-changing mystery with its roots in faraway England.

A Video Struggle…

Life becomes difficult for the video editor in trying to create a trailer for a comic book to upload to Youtube when so much of the available imagery can't be shown because it's a bit…explicit. After much struggle, this went up on Tuesday.

The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm well over halfway through Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker prizewinner, and it's easy to see why it received the accolade. Always an interesting writer, Hollinghurst here surpasses anything he's ever done. Wrapped around a simple concept—the effect through the ages a Rupert Brooke-like Cambridge poet's verses about an upper middle-class family has on an expanding number of people—the novel drags the reader willingly into the unfolding complications. The poem's effects ripple outward like splash rings in a pool. The beautifully drawn characters act and react according to their varied natures, but they all remain interestingly unpredictable…in the manner of real human beings.

There is the inherent advantage of nostalgia in seeing characters at different stages of their lives, and places at later times, and Hollinghurst makes the most of it. The story starts before the Great War with wealthy Cecil Valance—the poet—and his lover George, younger son of the family which owns "Two Acres," the house featured in the poem. Their sexual encounters are explicit but never graphic, and fraught with being observed by George's young sister, Daphne. Unaware of Cecil's true nature, she sets her teenage heart at the handsome poet, and it is in her autograph book that he writes the poem that resounds throughout the rest of the novel. In the second part, Cecil is a dead war hero, George is approaching a tediously married middle age, and Daphne has married Dudley, Cecil's overshadowed brother. And the intertwined complexities develop…

The time switches are cleverly handled, leaving you in ignorance for pages of exactly who is whom, especially when Daphne has remarried twice and changed surnames, and when her daughter, also married, is introduced as Mrs._____. Some might find the device an irritant, but in fact it allows you to settle into the new situations and characters before re-engaging with the aged people you know from the previous part. There is a sense of accomplishment in playing detective for a few pages until everything resolves naturally into the continuing narrative.

Hollinghurst's prose and dialog are lucent, languid, and snappy by turns. His character's voices are convincing and compelling—he writes the interior monologues of younger and older women as well as those of the men. Daphne's seven-year-old son Wilfred is a particular delight of petulance, uncertainty, and insistence, and has a child's uninformed awareness of the sexual tensions that abound on every page.

The Stranger's Child is a warm, funny, sad, and ultimately rewarding book.

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Rome & Pirates – a great combination

Just received two new books to review, both of them from Constable & Robinson. ROME: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a huge compilation of contemporary commentaries from the founding of Rome to the end of Justinian's reign in AD 565, edited by Jon E. Lewis. Then there's A BRIEF HISTORY OF PIRATES & BUCCANEERS, by Tom Bowling, which looks like a text-only version of "The History of Pirates" by Angus Konstam that Thalamus published way back in 1999, but since I haven't had time to get into it yet, that may be an unfair comparison.

A bit of non-fiction will make a break from the mammoth reading of Manda Scott's "Boudica" quartet (almost finished) and Stephen King's "Under the Dome". In between, I must find some time to finish a piece on the thrills, trials and tribulations of rewriting the novels of GA Henty for a modern audience (four available now at Smashwords.com, [plug].

A New Novel Upload

Finally, I got through the last minute cuts ’n fills and got "By Sheer Pluck" online. What was supposed to take about three weeks for Thalamus Publishing last year, ended up taking five months (on and off, in between a few other things) of revisions and re-ordering the original Henty text to conform to a more modern narrative flow.

What's missing now is a video trailer for Youtube and the Reckless Books website (www.recklessbooks.co.uk), but that's going to take some time – a lack of visual material is the problem.

Next, it's back to working on the fifth book, "Avenging Khartoum", which picks up where "Storm Over Khartoum" left off (logically…)