Set in the autumn of 1989 in New York City, the story of a disillusioned blue-collar worker and dedicated barfly, Pete Manson, and his disintegrating marriage to his beautiful and more aspirational wife, Kate. Sharing an inadequate apartment together, Manson spends his time cruising bars and parks and avoiding work as best he can. His regular drinking haunt is Frank's Bar, where he hangs out with affable barman, Mike, and fellow barfly and drifter, fading beauty, Mary. On his travels he en...

Paris in the 1990s. Writer's Block is the story of Henri, a womanising, gambling, hard-drinking, drug-taking, struggling writer, with high literary aspirations. His failure to complete the novel he's working on and make the big time leads him into a spiralling decline of addictions, putting both his relationship to partner, Monique, and his health at risk. It is the story of Henri's bohemian friends, Louis, Jean, Maurice, Michelle, Rosalie and Dominique, a group with artistic ambitions who...

Aslightly raunchier sequel to 21 Days In Swansea. It picks up the story a few months later, with retired investment banker, Edward Chapman, now running a second-hand bookshop with new partner, Jill, having left his old life and unfaithful estranged wife, Alice, behind in Oxford, with no plans to return. A chance visit to Neath one afternoon persuades him to open a second bookshop and coffee shop there but his Alice turns up unexpectedly, intent on staying 21 days in a bid to win h...

Years Spinning By Out Of Control combines the poems of the 1998 collection of the same name and the 2000 pamphlet Water Under the Bridge by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill. The poems explore themes of love, loss, longing, heartache and break-up, sex, substance abuse and social realism. Many appeared in their original format in the small presses of both the UK and America at the time of writing, and all the poems have been updated with revisions and additions for th...

Simon is a would-be writer and a serial monogamist, with a habit of self-sabotage. He loves women but has a habit of messing up his relationships with them, despite his best efforts and starting each new relationship with optimism and genuine conviction it will last this time.'Four Women' charts Simon's life with consecutive girlfriends, one after another, over a twenty-year period. Through a mixture of his own inadequacies and hang ups as well as theirs, things go wrong, until he e...

Jack - approaching sixty and pining for a lost love, Beth, living below an eccentric best friend, and working in a civil service job he hates - daydreams about a past he never had. Intermixed with reality, his daydreams are an obsessive fantasy world but one he writes down in more and more detail as it becomes strangely true but is it everything he expected and hoped it would be? His two worlds slowly merge, in a novel he entitles An Appointment With God that questions the very n...

A day in the life of Tom, a bored mid-fifties arts administrator, suddenly energised by the prospect of meeting his ex-fiancée, Fiona, for the first time in over thirty years. The dilemma is that Tom is married but enticed by the wealth of possibilities seeing Fiona might bring. The planned meeting causes him to reflect on the painful manner in which the couple first separated years earlier, and the many years in-between in which Tom had never entirely forgotten or got over Fiona despite t...

Sands of Time combines the poems of the 2013 full collection of the same name with the shorter pamphlets Missing Parts (2015) and Twenty Poems (2021), as well as a selection of new poems by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill and are the most recent ones he's written. The poems are in a confessional style and in the vein of the American Beat tradition. They explore themes of reflection, relationships, bereavement and the loss of a father, parenthood, ...

Poems From the Eighties is an introduction to the early work of Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill. All the poems were written in the 1980s when the poet was in his late teens and early twenties and an undergraduate of Swansea University, before training and later working as a local news reporter in Devon. The poems are taken from the full collections Earth Rites, 1984, New England in the Fall and Chasing the Dragon, both from 1985, and If You Co...

Marking the Occasions collects all the author's published short stories and short prose of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in chronological order, and incorporates three collections Marking the Occasions, Funny Farm and The Word. By keeping to date order, it allows the reader to follow the author's stylistic development over time from more experimental early works to short stories in the more classic, traditional style of the genre. The pieces variously explo...

Edward Chapman is a recently retired London financier, living near Oxford. He takes an unplanned holiday to South Wales, after discovering his younger, glamorous wife is having an affair with a work colleague. For Edward it's both a means of escape and an opportunity to spend time in the city of his former university, Swansea, where he met his first wife, Angela. During his stay, as he confronts the ghosts of his past and present, Edward slowly comes to terms with the fact he's been living...

Sick Note & Scrapbook combines the poems of the 1995 short pamphlet Sick Note and the 1998 short pamphlet Scrapbook by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill, when the author was working as a local news reporter in the South West of England. The poems of Sick Note are more personal and have themes of love, loss, longing, heartache and break-up, whilst the themes explored in Scrapbook are more general and centre on social realism. Many appeared i...