The intellectual and moral history of a clergyman's family.

The intellectual and moral history of a clergyman's family.

In this quasi-French farce masquerading as a novel, we meet Courtney Farquhar Tremayne, one hundred years young in the year 2000 and writing his memoirs about his ten odd (and you can believe that they were exceedingly odd) years touring with a second-rate vaudeville troupe (from approximately 1926 to 1936). Meet all of the interesting characters he knew from that magical medium now long departed. There are Bud and Boz, a dog act (Bud is the trainer and Boz the dog, although it was said that some were loathe to tell the difference). Then, there is one of the strangest acts ever to be seen on the vaudeville stage, Nick Knack Paddywack and his Knockabout Kids, a family acrobatic and comedy act. Meet Malachi and Alewyn Malarkey, Irelands version of George Burns and Gracie Allen. Also on board is Charles Mammy Kaufman, a blackface minstrel singer (a type of act no longer seen on any stage) whose not-so-secret secret is that he is, contrary to the convention of the day for these mammy singers, actually black. Then, there is Kelfer Milius, the pompous star actor of the show. And lastly is the beautiful and alluring (to Courtney, anyway) Prudence Bernadette, the shows star actress. Follow them and all these other vaudeville misfits on their ten-year excursion throughout countless Midwestern cow towns and backwater hamlets, where they ply their trade and, more often than not, find themselves in sometimes precarious, yet always comic, circumstances beyond their control.

Short stories and sketches of Bristol, Edinburgh and... er, San Francisco. Andy Gibb is not the Andy Gibb but his website would beg to differ and he did have the name first so he's sticking to it. Back in the Bristol area since 2009, writing since 2004 and a birder since 1995, Andy first came to the city as a student in 1974. Yup, he's ancient as Hell and has been around a bit - Italy, Arizona, California, Australia and New Zealand. And what's it taught him? Not a lot but he has seen 1,089 bird species.

This is a story about one man's struggle to overcome class discrimination, poverty, and abandonment in order to achieve success, wholeness, and recognition. It does not always make light reading, but as with anything in life, there are humorous elements. A mixture of narrative storytelling and academic investigation provides the necessary balance for discussing a difficult subject. From earliest childhood memories, the reader is taken through the commotion of school life and ultimately beyond into the world of work. There is a gradual reversal of roles, as the ideas applied to the writer in his youth are turned outwards upon his entourage, and subsequently, the rest of society. One need not always agree; but hopefully the book will provide at the very least food for thought, and demonstrate the limitations of any idea when taken to the extreme.

Meet the Thief who has an extraordinary thirst for stealing things beyond your imagination, meet the book collector with a unique obsession, eavesdrop on two Friends as they discuss the end of the world and accompany a man in search of a miracle cure for writer’s block. Take a tour along with ordinary women and men placed in extraordinary situations in this collection of short stories. Dive deep and be intrigued by both the magical and mundane. Lose yourself in a world much like ours but slightly stranger than our normal lives.