I think this week’s going to be fun and easy. A few days with my wife and daughter staying in a quaint cottage, wandering around the English countryside, visiting some show gardens, enjoying good food, and two or three books to read.
But next week should be different. My new book, Otto and Frankie, is officially launched on Friday, 4th September. I’m not expecting my world to turn upside down, it’ll probably be quite normal, but I started thinking about this book in early 2017, finally typing the first words in August of that year, finishing it in autumn 2019, and messing around trying to get it published ever since. So, I’ll have all the promo stuff to do, and then enjoy for a day or two a feeling of achievement and elation.
Why did it take me so long, you may ask? Well – it’s different to anything I’ve written before. My previous eleven books have been crime thrillers, where normal people find themselves entwined in very abnormal situations and resort to dark deeds. I felt I’d had enough of that. The world’s pretty dark at the moment, and I wanted to try something new.
Otto and Frankie – a dying man’s fight against injustice, his wife’s bizarre affair, and the love from his long-lost daughter – digs into people’s emotions, the life-changing challenges they face and how they cope, grief, raw emotions, love, and above all the triangular relationship between a dying man, determined to the last, with his loving but disloyal wife and his long-lost daughter who he’s reunited with for his last few weeks after twenty years apart.
I don’t know how Otto and Frankie will be received, but I enjoyed writing it, and hope others will enjoy reading it.
To pre-order e-book: amazon.uk, amazon.com. Buy the paperback now.
The parents I did not know – a short story about a man searching for the father he’d never met – is also written in the same genre and can be read in full elsewhere on this site.
Nick Wastnage 