Novels
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Poet Ian McMillan has praised my novel Dying is the Last Thing You Ever Want to Do.
What’s the book about? Seventeen-year-old Josie is a Yorkshire miner’s daughter, a good Catholic girl and brilliant at school. She might even get to university because her Aunt May has come into some insurance money. But then Hitler invades Poland and her whole world is ravaged by the violence of war. And there’s a different sort of violence closer to home when Josie falls for a charming rogue called Denny who involves her in the criminal underworld she never knew existed. Pretty soon, it’s not just German bombers killing her friends. And Josie has got herself a gun… Is it a good read? Well, Ian says of the book: “Michael writes with an ear for the everyday magic of speech, and an eye for the telling image” And Novelist Jim Crace, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, says: “This Home Front thriller, in which several plucky women take on the shady side of Yorkshire during World War Two, is gripping and authentic.” ISBN: 978-1-9160165-4-5 |
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In my novel The Gangers, an avenger rides into town on a white horse, looking for the men who killed his friend. In his saddlebag he carries a Colt 44. But this is no ordinary wild west scenario.
This is Yorkshire. The avenger is Sergeant Lorenzo Joseph of the British Army. And the background is the railway boom of the 1870s. This is a world where progress, poverty, industry and anarchy combine in a volatile mix. The shanty towns of the railway-building navvies are as lawless as the cattle towns of the American west. But there is a more gentle side to the story. Sergeant Joseph encounters Mollie, the poetry-loving 12-year-old daughter of the local vicar. And she falls innocently in love with her handsome knight on a white charger. Meanwhile, in the darkness of the shanty town, gang leader Moleskin Jimmy lies poised to strike again – at the Sergeant, at Mollie, or at anyone else who gets in his way. ISBN: 978-0-9561513-9-1 |
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Homer's ODC is a novel of crime and dark comedy!
What’s it all about? It's the start of the 21st century. And a single bullet will change two lives. RAYMOND is a shy young man . He wishes he'd gone to Uni. But his dad wants him in the family business. And his dad is a gangster and a killer. BARRY wants to be a poet. But he's also – in his own words – a user of the mental health services. And his two best friends are the late John Lennon and the even later Erwin Rommel, Hitler's military boss. IN A YORKSHIRE BUS STATION a shot rings out. It's the shot that brings Raymond and Barry together and sets off a sequence of violent events that ends in terrible murder and even more terrible poetry. ISBN: 978-0-9561513-7-7 |