Fiction

"The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward is the abstract spirit."

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

I write about people, art and war, resistance and collaboration. Facing uncertainty and challenges, how some discover strengths and weaknesses within complex, at times, harrowing situations. Themes of grief and accumulative PTSD as war progresses, and in the immediate aftermath, become reference points for the fragility but determination of ordinary people. In a time of war some resist, others collaborate, while most observe as bystanders. But is there a price to be paid for having a moral compass?

If You See Max, Gallery and Out of the Depths are the first two in the 'Framed: Art and War' series . The fourth novel is at the research stage.

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

A novel

!947 - War is over. One man is on a mission to retrieve his art collection stolen by the Nazis. A war-damaged soldier makes a shocking discovery and a gallery owner longs for news of his missing daughter. Later, fates collide in Moscow.

GALLERY

A novel in four parts

One story

MS in second draft

Part One 'UNDER THE ECLIPSE'

was submitted for the

M. Research Creative Writing thesis Awarded 2022

1940, the Germans are in Paris and begun looting the art collections. A collector, races against time to hide family and artwork before deportation. A curator creates fake catalogues, an artist paints in secret while a photographer treks homeward cross country in the snow with a mysterious companion. Their lives unknowingly entwined.

IF YOU SEE MAX

A novel

MS edited

The vibrant Crazy Years are over and Paris is under Nazi Occupation. Photographer Max disappears, an art-loving Abwehr major hunts a resistance cell and trains are leaving for Germany with boxes of stolen art. But what are two British intelligence officers looking for? And who is the real Max?

Sea Dreams is a collection of poetry prose I began writing not long after my arrival from the southeast England to live on a small acreage just outside Fort Macleod, southern Alberta, Canada in the summer of 2005.

'Yet, there seemed to be a smell of salt in the night air and, as winter came upon me and the first snows fell, I saw shapes and lines as on sandy beaches ...

As the prairie grass blew and rippled in the Chinook wind I imagined this place when once it was ocean and wondered in awe at how small I was.'

SEA DREAMS is available as an e-book