I am on a drive to finish my second novel over the next two months. I have just completed a period of research and am ready to push on to the end. It is longer than I thought it would be and I’m sure there’ll have to be cuts in the edit. However, anyone who comes to my house has to submit to having a couple of chapters being read to them. Reception so far has been good. So onward.
Here’s a first draft of the blurb:
‘Humphrey, a retired academic, considers himself to be a failure – at sex, at love, at life. He is acutely sensitive to noise and finds the twenty-first century bewildering. He expresses his disappointment at bi-weekly meetings with his cronies at The Seven Stars and in wrangling with his next door neighbour about her cat, Aristotle.
Seventeen year-old Jack is going off the rails. He is full of anger at the cards life has dealt him. He feels he has no future. He vents his anger in acts of vandalism and deliquency.
When Jack trashes Humphrey’s garden it is the beginning of an unlikely friendship in which both stand to gain.
But when Humphrey is accused of a crime he did not commit, Jack cannot be found. Is this misfortune or a deliberate betrayal?
Ian Thomson has written a nuanced novel which is by turns hilarious and poignant. While Martin, his debut novel, was about revenge, Humphrey and Jack is about redemption. Once again his agile prose will forbid you to put it down.’
