From Woking to Benidorm? Yes, seriously!

It's an absolute privilege to welcome Tony Harrison and his first book Benidorm Seriously!! to #wokingwrites. When possible (or necessary) Tony still divides his time between Woking and the notorious Spanish resort. 

 

About the author, and the book… 

Tony Harrison is a former Woking resident, well, Knaphill to be precise. A successful local business entrepreneur, he was once featured in a national women's magazine as one of the country’s most eligible 'bachelors'. He is now happily married to his wife Jane and runs a busy hotel in Spain.

Tony escaped from what he describes as the ‘grey skies of the UK', to one of Europe’s No1 tourist resorts, Benidorm, to start a new life.

He went on to buy and manage a gay hotel in the old town, something he never expected to do. Far from being gay himself, he has witnessed the crazy, strange, and downright bizarre behaviour of tourists and hotel guests. From gangsters to prostitutes, from chickens to S&M, he says his life would never be the same or normal ever again 

Labelling himself as a new author, Benidorm Seriously!!, his debut book, is dedicated to all those that love Benidorm and all those that have ever wondered what it would be like to run a business in Spain.

Benidorm Seriously!! is available in both paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.

 

Tony Harrison

Top Amazon Review: 

The writer’s warts and all look at life in the touristy Spanish resort of Benidorm is a cracking read. As you turn each page you’ll feel as if you’re sitting in a friendly Iberian bar sharing a beer with the author and him talking to you personally revealing anecdote after anecdote, many of them extremely funny, and his personal battle(s) to revive the fortunes of a run-down hotel in Benidorm he’d had the courage to purchase.

The fact he succeeds is mainly through the support of his immediate family, friends and many of the gay community who live and reside in this buzzing resort. Enroute you’ll meet many larger-than-life characters and wonder at the vagaries, often hilariously related, between the Spanish and British way of lives.

Along with the many laughs, there is great personal sadness and heartache, but Mr Harrison never seeks sympathy from the reader and at the book’s end he simply invites you for a chat, if you’re passing by, with him and his wife at their Babylon Hotel. After reading this terrific and often funny book, I feel certain that you won’t be disappointed at meeting them both. – David Hunt.

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 #wokingwrites

(formerly 'Writers at the Gate')

Welcome...

 

Yes, the name of the blog has been changed
to better reflect our commitment
to promoting the newly published books
of Woking’s fantastic indie authors.

Meet the authors HERE

#wokingwrites

First Anniversary

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. 

Carol Hedges

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

New poetry collection by Woking poet, Greg Freeman

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.

(Click on image to read 'blurb')

About the 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 Freeman

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

 

 BUY HERE

"...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

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A tribute to the late Knaphill Author - Toby J. Cole

Toby J. Cole's debut novel, 'Beyond the Pales' really deserved a much wider press than it eventually received.  It's a 'must-have book' if you enjoy storylines set in the Woking area, and certainly one, that will keep you hooked right until the end. There was to be a sequel, but sadly, due to Toby's untimely passing, that was never to be.

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

Toby Cole

Brief Bio... 

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.

Toby's selection of short stories

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Harriet Steel's 'Cold Case in Nuala' reaps its just rewards

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.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (7 May 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 214 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8745688812
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 1.37 x 20.32 cm

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Brief Bio…

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