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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

The late 1990s in a provincial town in Greater London. Two very different characters, one male, one female, with one thing in common, dissatisfaction with their everyday lives and solace and escape in a private world of fantasies and daydreams. Martin is nerdy, obsessed with sports trivia, struggling to fit in at his workplace, where he is bullied. Jacqui an unmarried mum suffering at the hands of an abusive partner. The novel charts their respective progress through failed attempts at rel...

Bristol 1985 - at its heart a thriving indie music scene with its own clubs, shops like Revolver Records and releases by labels like Sarah Records which offer escape for fifteen-year old kids like Will, who holds imaginary conversations with the likes of Dan Treacy of The Television Personalities, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine - until with his friend John, he seizes the opportunity to form their own band and to carve a path to acceptance, a recor...

At Heart A Romantic combines the poems of the 2004 pamphlet An Essentially English Voice, the 2005 full collection The History of Civilisation and the 2006 pamphlet At Heart A Romantic by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill in one volume. The poems are in a confessional style and in the vein of the American Beat tradition. They explore themes of reflection, relationships, emotional and spiritual stagnation, lost love, breakup, lifestyle, pare...