My Brother John

The book is a collection of memories of childhood and adolescence, of growing up as one of a family of seven in a small South Staffordshire mining village in the 1940s and 1950s. The family home had no electricity and relied on an open fire for all cooking and heating. The book looks at different aspects of life, such as earliest memories, starting school, wartime experiences, chores and scavenging for fuel, Christmas and leisure activities, immersing the reader in a time, which, though still within living memory is a world away from the 21st century. It is very much a personal account of how a less fortunate family coped in these difficult times and is very different from the usual memoirs of these times. Its final two chapters deal with the death of the parents, when the writer and his brother become the legal guardians of their five younger siblings and can now be considered as finally out of childhood and adolescence.

My Football Cities

As a life-long football fan and also a lover of travel, Simon Pask combines the two in this intimate collection of football-led travels throughout Europe. For armchair football followers, the book serves as a virtual tour around many of the hotbeds of European football, whilst for those keen to experience the stadiums and cities themselves, there are many practical tips on how to make the trips a reality, including some ideas on multi-match weekends. This book covers vast ground: you’ll find major football cities such as London, Glasgow and Munich, but also some less well-known locations such as Oslo, Bologna and Bruges. What results is an inspirational book, a cross between a football stadium guide, a city travel book and a personal diary, in which Simon’s passion for the game and his desire to make the most of each unique location come through in his own personal writing style.

My Friend’s Place

In this debut book, Robert calls out to the hesitant senior traveller with encouragement and caution.

With the aid of trains, planes and Tuk-Tuks, this senior traveller approaches his seventieth year fuelled with the energy and wonder of his inner child. Full of self- belief, a small pinch of common sense and a huge ego, his adventure to India proves to be a humbling, hilarious, hazardous, and often, emotional experience.

Gradually, as his adventure unfolds, his ego momentarily weakens and fleeting glimpses of his true nature manifests itself, though sometimes painfully. This process has been called ‘finding oneself’, however as the saying goes, the more one finds out the less one knows.

My Life As a Nomad

Mary Smith was born and raised in a country behind the Iron Curtain. She lived in a tiny apartment and shared a bedroom with her parents during the frigid winter months. She wore school uniforms and red pioneer ties. She ate variations of potato dishes, stood in line for a loaf of bread, carried heavy blocks of ice during the hot summer days, played hide-and-seek with the children in the building, and thought that life was wonderful. Her nonconformist parents, however, talked of a world beyond the Iron Curtain and planned to escape to a place where they thought they would find freedom.

My Life As a Nomad recounts Mary’s peregrinations through five countries on three continents that began in 1964. What started as an adventure full of promises, evolved as a perennial search for a “home” amid the customs and traditions of an unfamiliar world.

“Adam was but human – this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”

Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

“The quality of mercy... is twice bless'd;

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes; ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.”

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

My Life, My Way. The Conditioning.

The meanderings and twists and turns of real-life told through the poetry of a crazy mind… or am I sane? You decide…

What if I told you all is not as it seems…

What if I told you this is the land of dreams…

Dive inside, come on, let’s see… the twists and turns of the life we see.

My Parents' Daughter

The mob bullying of an accomplished and expert senior secondary English teacher and Co-ordinator in a Victorian state school in Australia is re-told in My Parents’ Daughter giving a vivid insight into the hellish world of its victim. This first part of Victoria Hartmann’s Memoir is about workplace bullying by her four male principals, plus others, in the new millennium. This otherwise dark theme is re-told with good humour. Victoria’s intention is for her reader to laugh a lot outwardly but be moved inwardly to further discussions about this sinister blight on our democracies; perhaps even be moved to action and further the cause.

It shows how Victoria’s employer – the Department of Education, plus associated bodies, dealt with Victoria’s injuries and complaints. It questions accountability and equity or rather the lack there of. This memoir tackles head on psychological bullying and spot lights the notion that authority does not equate to honesty thus our need for external checks on governmental power brokers. The memoir’s intention is to enlighten and demands justice and change leading to prevention. It is a courageous effort by a courageous woman who owes everything to her genetics and upbringing. Please note that all names are fictitious but the content word for word true.

My Young Life and Experience after 1945

“Mum, where is Dad, has he gone to bed?”

I didn't know where my dad had gone because he just disappeared. I should really have got used to my dad getting drunk because he seemed to spend a lot of time drinking. But when I think about it, his drunkenness didn’t bother me too much: it was the punching of my mum and myself that hurt me the most.

However, I did find time to have fun with a couple of friends that I had. The secret agent games that I invented from time to time coincided with the true-life games and excitement that I found along the way.

Nationality: Medicine

'Medicine transcends all barriers; it knows no frontiers, it respects all credos and, most importantly, it treats all human beings as equals. Despite the tremendous socio-economic inequalities that I encountered and experienced in each one of the four countries where I’ve lived and practised medicine (Peru, United States, Spain and the UK), I’ve always been proud to find that the Hippocratic Oath is unwavering and equally applied to all citizens. My identity never came from having a certain nationality, speaking a specific language or even from my family genealogy. It came (and still does) from the set of values that the medical profession professes and that I, as a doctor, hold close to my heart. These values are the building blocks of society; without them, everything else crumbles. My “nationality” is medicine and my allegiance is to the human race. The lives and the clinical cases in this book are all real and they tell the story of how the Hippocratic Oath prevails even in the most challenging conditions. They remind us that no matter how much adversity lies before us (poverty, socio-economic instability, lack of resources, etc.), with sufficient effort, creativity and perseverance, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. After all, altruism – the bedrock of medicine – is free of charge, independent of location and always available for anyone who’s willing to use it.'
Dr Carlo Canepa

Of Ships and Shoes and Scotland

The author is a Scot from the small (two shop) village of Whins of Milton, two miles south of the Royal Burgh of Stirling. He has always loved the sea and ships, and was master of the first Australian flag anchor handler, operating in offshore oilfields around Australia.

The book covers a wheen o’ topics – growing up in the Whins, then living in Australia, to which he emigrated in 1968 with his wife and family, to his wanderings in the countries of the Pacific Basin. Later, it also makes some comments on Australians, their character and contentment (and pride) as to who they are as a race of people, living under the Southern Cross.

Ships and the sea are never far away. Also part of this story is the Greek Tragedy of the demise of Alfred Holt, the author having been indentured to that heroic and exemplary Liverpool company as a deck apprentice in 1957. The note, Welcome to Country, says it all as to his worldview of Australians, an attitude almost Caledonian in its sense of directness and curiosity, particularly regarding the workings of the vast world which is all around us.

On the Eighth Day

Hi, browser! Welcome to the Pacific Northwest of Canada. If you buy this collection of an old man’s memories, you will not be purchasing a history book, or a novel, or even a biography. The old man once taught English at a small University in the hinterland mountains of British Columbia, the Kootenays. The old man has Parkinson’s, a disease with a sense of humour. Parkinson’s patients suffer hallucinations. Our sleep is tormented by pieces of memory that flash like bolts of lightning on a hot summer night. The book is a collection of twenty-six vignettes, numbered, mostly untitled, so you never know if the vignette will be funny, or sad, or shocking, or nostalgic. The old man is watching the last of his life crumble away.

On with the Show

On with the Show follows on from the first volume of Love and Music, a joint autobiography of singers Christopher Davies and Barbara Kendall.

In 1965, Barbara graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and joined Chris in the musical profession. They had gotten married in 1963 and this is the interesting story of how they coped with what was bound to be a demanding way of life.

One-Way Ticket to Honolulu

Should you follow your intuition in your darkest hour?

Anette is 32 and living an expat life in Hong Kong with her husband, Phil. The world seems to lie at her feet. But when Phil dies tragically, her world stops.

Sitting on the floor at their Hong Kong apartment, surrounded by all their stuff, Anette is asked by his company where to send all her belongings. And the only thought she has is that they should send it all to Honolulu.