A Test of Strength

From surviving childhood trauma and confiding in her doll to cope with the abuse of her father, to giving birth to a child with spina bifida at age 19, this Australian woman’s life has been marked by strength and determination. She shares her inspiring story of triumph, including her pride at winning the title of Mrs NSW in a quest to raise funds for disabled children and her bravery in facing stage three breast cancer. But her strength is tested to its limits with the heartbreaking loss of two grown children, and she shares the spiritual signs that bring her comfort during her emotional journey of writing her life’s story. This is a brutally honest and uplifting autobiography of one woman’s determination to overcome the obstacles life throws her way.

A Tiger Called Luger

Luger was a handsome young tiger who, for some reason only known to him, just wasn’t happy with the way he looked! He tried everything he could to change the way he looked! He tried rubbing his stripes off, washing them off, covering them up with mud…because he wanted to look like someone else, like a lion.

Find out what happens next. Does Luger manage to hide his stripes?

Join Luger to learn about being yourself.

A Time in Paris

In the sweltering Indian summer of 1870, a young Englishman is sent to Paris as Prussian invaders advance on the French capital with the largest siege army ever assembled. The City of Light is cut off from the outside world, the population trapped behind its tall ramparts. As the siege continues for a month, then a second, a hungering third, a frozen fourth and into a starved fifth, the Englishman, a stock young gentleman of his Victorian times, falls in love with a radical French enchantress who by chance saves his hide. The lovers’ fate is entwined with those of a tormented French general appointed to defend Paris and an impatient Prussian grandee (Otto von Bismarck) hell-bent on bringing the ‘capital of civilisation’ to its knees. The unlikely love story turns upon true events that have shaken our world through to the present.

Praise for David Lawday’s recent book Danton: Giant of the French Revolution:

“Spirited and highly readable… Lawday creates some great set pieces and striking turning points… He is able to capture the atmosphere of the early revolution: its inflammable mix of devilment and righteousness, reckless selflessness and flagrant self-promotion. He sees that Danton was more than the sum of his crimes, the sum of his secrets; he celebrates his ‘large heart and violent impulses in an irresolvable conflict’.”

Hilary Mantel, The London Review of Books.

A Time of Flames – Book One

‘There is a void within me; a darkness that no amount of booze, sex or drugs, can heal. Each morning, I wake with a name on my lips. Always a girl’s name. Always the wrong name.’

An abducted boy and an imprisoned girl, separated by space and time, are destined to be lovers and saviours of a broken world.

Sebastian is privileged, handsome and lost. He struggles with depression and substance abuse as he desperately tries to come to terms with a world he doesn’t understand.

Sebastian paints to quell the darkness. His work depicts a sombre world full of decaying gothic buildings. One night, as if guided by another’s hand, he paints the portrait of a beautiful woman. He gazes into the jade green eyes that mirror his own, and there he finds a reason to live. With every quickening beat of his heart, he knows he has painted a living, breathing woman. The woman who will heal the void within him. The woman he must find. The woman whose name is on his lips at the break of each new day.

As he begins his search, the path Sebastian treads is more mysterious and dangerous than he could have ever imagined. It leads him to a strange house where he discovers horrifying secrets and learns the truth about the woman he seeks and her link to the ruthless man who called himself his father.

A Traveller in China

For Greg McEnnally a traveller should be a pilgrim and not just a tourist, and the journey itself is just as important as the destination. With this appreciation of life the writer takes us into China - a place many of us may never visit - and provides us with a developing picture of this strident and yet enigmatic country.
Having taught English for ten years in China the writer can depend on the hospitality of many of his former students and acquaintances as he takes advantage of the national holidays and tours the country. It is a country of contrasts; the wonderful companionship offered by ordinary Chinese set against the predatory taxi drivers; the brilliant architecture standing proud above the sea of rubbish that can be found alongside it.
It is a growing country, young in geology and yet old in culture. Greg McEnnally suffers the rigours of overcrowded buses and trains to bring the reader - China.

A True Story

Decades of profound experiences and downright bizarre situations thrust Anne Bateson unexpectedly into the realms of the paranormal.

As a seeker of truth, this new author felt compelled to share her reality with others. She’s spent her life immersed in books as a prolific reader, but why choose this moment to switch from reader to writer?

It’s all about enlightening others.

Anne’s light-hearted storytelling style sums up how humour saved her sanity while navigating her way through frightening and curious events.

A Vanished Hand

What do you do when the ghost of a serial killer taps you on the shoulder and follows you home? Haunted and accused of her secretary’s murder, Kate turns to her glamorous, psychic friend Jane and the mysterious witch Diana. Can they uncover the identity of the nineteenth century serial killer so that celestial justice may take its course? Snow is falling on the ancient walls of Kate’s home town; darkness descends and time is running out…

A Visit to the Zoo

Being a Lancastrian, I enjoyed Stanley Holloway’s ‘Albert and the Lion’ as a child and so resolved to attempt a monologue of my own. I chose the name Albert Ramsbottom in tribute to that earlier story, and my own tale is, in a manner of speaking, a sequel to it.

A Visit to the Zoo is based upon a true story that was recounted to me in a pub many years ago, which must have lurked in the back of my mind ever since. Something similar actually happened but I have adapted it to suit the character of Albert, the ‘hero’ of the yarn. I am almost ashamed to confess that Albert is a re-construct of myself as a boy, whilst his mother is the product of observing the adversities of parenting suffered by my own three daughters.

My wife and I took our niece, Lucy, to London Zoo, where we, too, were allowed to feed penguins. I can vouch for their voracious appetites and their complete absence of manners, together with the ready use of their beaks, and believe that this harrowing experience constitutes true in-depth research into the workings of a penguin’s mind.

I wrote the story to entertain my grandchildren, but I doubt if they enjoyed the telling as much as I enjoyed the writing. I do hope it makes you smile when reading it to your audience or yourself.

A Voice for Rebekah

In the years following the deaths of her parents and brother in a vehicle crash, Australian Anna O’Reilly is surprised to learn her mother, Elizabeth, had been adopted at birth. Curious to know more and, armed only with her mother’s date and place of birth, St Catherine’s Orphanage in Devon, Anna begins her search.

Because of the time that has elapsed and the closure of the orphanage in the 1950s, Anna believes the possibility of finding anything is remote. She is wrong.

Anna discovers her grandmother was a young Jewish girl, Rebekah Kominski, who struggled to survive and escape persecution in war-torn Poland. At the end of the war, she, with other children, is taken to the Lake District and later assigned to a foster family, but questions remain.

What happened to cause Rebekah to be banished from what was to be the start of a new and better life to an orphanage and a harsh existence? While at the orphanage, she became pregnant. Was she raped? Why and how, after giving birth at aged thirteen, did she disappear?

Anna continues her search until she finds the answers and reveals the shocking truth behind Rebekah’s disappearance.

A Walk in "Wild" Wales with George Borrow

In his Welsh classic, Borrow provides an account of his walk from Llangollen to Swansea in 1856, a walk which at the time would have been a pursuit of epic proportions. Borrow’s literary musings, historical anecdotes and experiences along the way, presented in the form of a journal, provide an insight to Welsh life as it was in the middle of the 19th Century.

In a world immersed in the industrial revolution, Borrow was undoubtedly struck by the magnitude and pace of change that was happening around him. But it would not have been evident to him that the world could be anything like it is today. A world without motor cars, no electricity, no telephones, no aeroplanes, no police force anything like we know it today and the wonders of a technological revolution that has turned the world on its head not even a figment of the imagination, that was the world of Borrow.

A Walk in “Wild” Wales with George Borrow compares Borrow’s Wales with Wales today and captures events that have impacted on towns that Borrow passed through and some of the characters they have produced who have helped shape a Welsh culture built on a unique language and a hardiness of spirit descendant from its farming and mining heritage.  

A War Time Childhood And This is the Way I Saw It

I am in my eighties and have enjoyed reading books all of my life. I believe that those of us who enjoy reading books should write one and this is mine.

As a child growing up during the Second World War, family members over the generations have often asked me about my memories of that time.

This is how I remember it.

A Way to Go

An intense romance developed out of an illicit and highly sensual affair of more than 10 years which survived many hurdles.

Freed from the ties of work and family by retirement and bereavement, the couple embark on a trip of a lifetime around the coasts of Europe, with its idyllic beaches, historic cities, fascinating art galleries and ancient sites.

This is a gripping and highly readable novel full of wit, fun and escapist pleasures, but with disturbing happenings which raise serious issues of love, estrangement and loss.