Welcome...
to better reflect our commitment
to promoting the newly published books
of Woking’s fantastic indie authors.
Welcome...
I'm pleased to say, WOKING WRITES (formerly Writers at the Gate) has quickly become an important platform for authors living in the Woking area who wish to showcase their various titles.
In our first year, we've also been able to oversee the stocking of books by our authors in the Lionsheart Bookshop in Woking's Commercial Way. My special thanks to Patrick and his team at the popular shop/café for kindly helping to support us.
Our authors were also recently featured in the February issue of Writing Magazine, the UK's top selling writing mag.
At the outset, together with our local writers, the blog invited a number of guest authors in conjunction with The Coffee Pot Book Club to help enhance its profile and get things off the ground.
Some successful indie authors including Carol Hedges (pictured) and Judith Cranswick also agreed to participate for which I am very grateful.
The blog will be hosting the 2nd Woking Writers’ Week in May. The 'event' proved very successful last year and brought many authors together. Many have since become firm friends.
If you are an author (or know of any), who are yet to appear on the blog. Please get in touch by email at: admin@malfoster.co.uk We look forward to hearing from you.
Name Change. The blog has now undergone a ‘subtle’ name change to better reflect its local status. Links to pages, however, should not be affected!
You can check out all our authors and their latest published titles HERE
Best Regards, Mal
#wokingwrites
Greg Freeman's latest poetry collection, The Fall of Singapore, marks the 80th anniversary of the Allied surrender at Singapore to numerically inferior Japanese forces, which led to thousands of deaths of prisoners of war and local workers forced to build the infamous Burma-Thailand ‘Death Railway’. The poet’s father was a railway survivor, and his words can be heard in this book.
February 15 2022 marked the 80th anniversary of the fall of Singapore, the surrender of numerically superior Allied forces to a Japanese army - a moment that has gone down in history as Britain’s biggest military capitulation.
Woking poet
Greg Freeman’s father Ted Freeman was one of the huge number of Allied soldiers
taken prisoner. With many others, he was later forced to work on the infamous
Burma-Siam ‘Death Railway’. Many thousands did not survive its hardships and
brutality.
Greg’s father died in 1989, and since then he has been trying to find a way to tell his father’s story. This month he has published a pamphlet collection of poems, The Fall of Singapore, that includes a sequence about the railway. As he says, it has been a long journey and writes...
“Soon after
my father died I went to the Imperial War Museum and asked to see war veterans’
accounts of the Death Railway. I was brought a couple of shoeboxes full of individual
memoirs, maybe a few typed sheets, the odd published book. I spent several
sessions at the museum going through these, making notes, assembling a picture
of what it had been like.
My father
had given me some information. In the late 1970s and early 80s we would
sometimes talk late at night, and before I slept I would always transcribe what
he had said. His words are interspersed with poems in The Fall of Singapore.
Beginning
in the 1990s, I was always trying to find a way of telling his story. I tried
writing a novel – I had tried writing a few novels over the years – but that
didn’t work. Then I attempted to encapsulate the whole thing in a little story which
made the shortlist at a Guildford literary festival competition. In 2008 during
a brief stop in Thailand, we made a day trip – by train – to Kanchanaburi and
the bridge over the River Kwai. After I turned to poetry I wrote a sestina about
the Death Railway called ‘Learning By Heart’ which was commended in a Wilfred
Owen Association competition. In 2020, around the 75th anniversary of VJ Day, a
poet friend suggested I publish a sequence. I thought no more about it until
late last year when I realised the 80th anniversary of Singapore was fast
approaching. Could this finally be the moment?
It’s thanks
in great measure to Guildford publishers Dempsey & Windle, who have turned
it all around with remarkable sympathy and speed, that it has finally happened. Like
so many others, my father never expected to find himself in the jungle in
Thailand. A line in one of the poems says: “The call of the empire? He had no
dreams.”
Dad worked
in a succession of Southern railway ticket offices before the war. As it turned
out, he worked on the railway before, during, and after the war. I’m not sure that
he ever particularly appreciated the irony.
This
collection also includes other poems with wartime settings. Thus there is one
about the Islamic peace garden outside Woking – formerly a burial ground for
Muslim soldiers from both wars – called ‘A Foreign Wood’. But the heart of the
collection is the experience of those prisoners of war in Thailand. My book is
intended as a tribute to them all – to those who survived, and to those who
sacrificed their lives.” - Greg Freeman
ISBN 9781--913329-69-3
Copyright, Greg Freeman, 2022
Paperback, 210x148mm
50 pages
RRP £8.00
"...written with
reverence and candour and without a judgmental eye, which allows the
experiences of everyday civilians to shine clearly through the darkness of
war." - Antony Owen, Peace poet
* * *
About the book...
Why is a Forensic Anthropologist murdered in the largest cemetery in Western Europe? Detective Superintendent Pandora Kingdom needs to find out and fast. As well as battling the killer, she has her own demons to deal with. She lost her arm and leg while police mentoring in Afghanistan. Does she still have the strength for the hunt? Assisted by Steve Bridger, an MI5 agent, Guy Hobbs a History professor and the ghost of the soldier who died when she was blown up. She soon finds out that she has choices to make and needs to know who is really on her side. The killer’s trail leads to a secret research laboratory in Porton Down where the victim worked. Is she following the right trail? What experiments are really going on in the woods there? Why does a police inspector kill himself? and what is the link that leads her back to Brookwood Cemetery, as the body count begins to rise. A cemetery that holds a quarter of a million dead souls holds many secrets. What do an order of Orthodox Monks guard so carefully? What are the fields of graves and mausoleums hiding within them? What is driving the killer on? Pandora Kingdom thinks she knows. Does she have the strength left to risk everything? Or have the parts of herself, left on the dusty fields of Afghanistan, taken more than she can give.
If you live in Woking and enjoy reading books set in and around the local area, then Beyond the Pales is for you.
You can find the book on Amazon HERE
Born in 1961, Toby J. Cole sadly passed away in September 2020
leaving a wife and three adult children. Beyond the Pales was Toby's only novel and is a crime thriller set predominately at Brookwood Cemetery,
and in and around Woking, Surrey. He also penned a collection of short stories
entitled The Assassination of Hilary Mantel. The Booker Prize winner, Mantel lived in a penthouse at the
former Brookwood Hospital in the village, indeed, “just a stone’s throw,” from
where Toby lived. Toby spent the first six years of his working life as a
registered nurse before joining the Metropolitan Police. Later in his career,
he conducted police mentoring in Iraq and armed protection in Afghanistan. He took up story writing after taking early retirement.
Kirkus' Review of 'Beyond the Pales'...
A debut crime thriller in which a forensic scientist is found murdered in England’s enormous Brookwood Cemetery. Pandora Kingdom is a talented homicide detective in Surrey, England. She’s also a double amputee, having lost an arm and leg to a bomb in Afghanistan. Over 20 years solving murders, however, has made her a tough, go-to detective, so she’s assigned to the case of Susan Thompson. The victim, a forensic scientist with an interest in body decomposition, was found in Brookwood Cemetery. She was shot in the head and her hands were nailed to a gravestone. At the crime scene, Pandora teams with MI5 agent Steve Bridger, who informs her that Susan researched, among other things, how chemical weapons affect pig corpses (since it’s illegal to use human bodies). Eventually, the investigators learn that Susan was fairly promiscuous - with both men and women - and enjoyed living beyond her means. Large money transfers in and out of Susan’s bank account and a storage unit (filled with strange, telling contents) point toward why someone might have killed her. But as fresh bodies begin piling up, the case assumes greater urgency. Did Susan die for the selling of government secrets, angering a lover or both? Debut author Cole begins this new crime series in a striking locale and imbues the narrative with generous historical and police procedural knowledge. The immediately likeable Pandora thrives in a male-dominated field without being completely humourless, like when she asks, “Are you checking out my wooden leg Mr. Bridger?” There’s also a touch of whimsy in scenes when she speaks with the ghost of a soldier named Daniel Sutton. And while the trope of a promiscuous victim is familiar, Cole handles it with subtlety. The narrative’s main flaw is that the punctuation occasionally slips (“What is with, the red tape?”). These moments don’t detract from a smartly paced tale, however, thick with chilly ambience and some thoroughly shocking deaths. The second volume will be eagerly awaited. A truly instructive debut characterised by heart, wit and restraint.
Since Harriet Steel featured at Writers at the Gate during our 2021 Woking Writer’s Week, she has gone on to release, ‘Cold Case in Nuala,’ the tenth title in her successful ‘Detective De Silva Mysteries,’ series. The book has already raked in hundreds of positive reviews and ratings on Amazon since its publication last May.
About the book…
It’s January 1940 and the day of Nuala’s famous motor rally. Excitement is at full throttle but matters take a dark turn when that same evening, human remains are found buried in a lonely corner of a local tea plantation. Inspector de Silva has a cold case to solve. Add a playboy racing driver, a missing Bugatti and a family scandal hushed up years ago into the mix and he has plenty to think about. You can be sure that whatever happened in the past, now de Silva’s in the driving seat, you’re in for a gripping ride.
Harriet Steel is a British author who writes a series of widely
praised, atmospheric mysteries in a traditional style. A few years ago, she
spent time on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka, and this is where they are
set, but in the 1930s rather than the modern day, when it was still the British
colony of Ceylon. Her love of history, art, and travel influences her writing,
and she also published four historical novels before turning to crime.
Born in London,
her family then moved to a farm in the country where she grew up. She later
studied law at Cambridge University and was a lawyer for many years before becoming a writer. She would love to go back in time and spend a day having
lunch with Hercule Poirot, tea with Miss Marple, and dinner at the Ritz with Lord
Peter Wimsey.
If you would like to get in touch with her or find out more about her work, here are her social media links: -
Facebook – Harriet Steel Author
Twitter - @harrietsteel1
Website - https://harrietsteel.com
Blog - http://harrietsteel.blogspot.com/
Harriet's other books in the series
I would like to thank all those authors who have kindly submitted their latest titles and allowed them to be showcased on ‘Writers at the Gate’ throughout the year.
I launched the blog back in March as I felt there were limited
platforms available for local authors to promote their own books, particularly
if they were self-published.
The blog now proudly boasts a
merry band of Woking-based writers who have all been able to see their names and
books up in lights in an online environment that has already attracted hundreds of
visitors - in fact, many potential readers who would not
have otherwise known about our writing.
In the new year,
the blog should receive some extra publicity via the national and local press
(Watch this Space!) There will also be a 2nd Woking Writers Week in May
with other initiatives being considered, such as meetups and book signings. Of
course, these will be subject to the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.
Many thanks for
your support throughout 2021 and I would like to wish you all a safe and happy
Christmas and a prosperous new year.
Mal Foster
(Blog Admin)
* If you are an author local to the Woking area - Please come and join us - You can submit your latest published title HERE