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?

Galerie and If You See Max are the first two in the 'Art and War' series about Paris, art and war. The third book, Out of the Depths, will be completed in 2024.

GALERIE

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

A Jewish art collector hurries to save his collection and keep his family safe. A museum curator hides works of art and falsifies catalogues. A Louvre employee makes secret sketches. All race against time, committed to resisting Nazi art theft. Two strangers, a photographer and a girl, escape across fields and rail tracks covered in snow. Arrests, deportations, fake identities, no one is safe, as people and boxes of paintings are loaded onto trains heading east.

Set in and around Paris, autumn 1940 until late 1944, when the war is far from over, information about people and art emerge binding four parts of one story together.

A Jewish photographer's story unfolds as one timeline against a backdrop of resistance, fake identities, art theft and deportations in Occupied Paris during World War II. Two British officers, one struggling with memory lapses and mounting PTSD, gather evidence of war crimes across a second. Both timelines converge in the turmoil of Berlin in 1945 with painful revelations.

IF YOU SEE MAX

A novel

MS edited

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