Abirami Forbes and the Magic Sapphire

Abirami Forbes and the Magic Sapphire is a wonderful novel that celebrates Indian mythology and Indian dance.

It's written by Priya Hunt and it tells the story of Abirami Forbes.

Abirami's life is devastated when she loses her family in a tragic car accident.

She is met with the terrifying prospect of having to lead a new life in India, where she is to study Indian dancing at an ancient dance school.

She finds it hard to fit in at first, but she is determined to learn to dance. Her motivation? To teach a rival a lesson.

However, Abirami (known as Abi to her friends) learns that her mother is now a celestial being who Abi can visit in heaven. If only she can track down a magic Sapphire. But there's a problem to be faced before she can visit her mother. There's a demon called Varun who is also after the gem.

Abi learns of the even steps she needs to climb in order to visit her mother in heaven.She has to perform some dangerous and daring tasks to evade Varun and to defeat his attempts to sabotage her attempts.

Can she overcome Varun and find her way to heaven to visit her family? Will she also be able to save the world from doom?

But can Abi find a way to do so much more than anyone could have ever expected of her? Read this extraordinary and very readable book to find out.

Delhi-born Priya is classically trained dancer and has been able to write a wonderful and imaginative story for young people that is based on her knowledge and love of Indian dancing and her fascination and respect for the ancient mythologies of India.

It's published by Matador at £8.99. I think it will be in the holiday luggage of many young readers this summer.

Keeping Them Off The Streets

Keeping Them Off The Streets is the autobiography of youth worker Tim Caley.

It's not merely the story of Tim's life. He has skilfully intertwined his personal memoir with a social history and an examination of the constantly moving and changing politics and policies in the field of yout work and of you people over the past 40 years. And how these policies impacted at the grassroots level.

Tim has eschewed the formal and academic way of looking at the issues and events. Instead he has chosen to provide a warm, human commentary based on his own experiences.

Although it contains amusing anecdotes and is written in a humorous fashion, it is intended to contain message and information that are vitally relevant and important messages about the continuing needs of young people as we get deeper and deeper into the 21st Century.

Tim started as a fresh, young and keen youth worker of 24 years age in 1972 in a tough area in Sheffield. He was pleasantly surprised that he had the support of the local police inspector, which wasn't always the case.

He points out that, in the 1970s, youth work was viewed through the lens of Marxist theories, of class, race and gender.

Although he had two degrees he became a teacher and later a youth worker with no formal qualifications in either teaching or youth work, which, he readily admits, did make him feel like something of a fraud when he compared himself to colleagues who did have the relevant qualifications.

He relates a very telling anecdote. A group of youth workers, it is reported, had a meeting with Edward Heath, the then Prime Minister.

They were lobbying him on benefits of youth work. They spent a considerable amount of time berating him on what they perceived as the lack of recognition, vale and their credibility.

Heath had listened to them, with patience, and eventually asked them to please explain what youth work achieved?

There was a period of pregnant silence and the youth workers found it hard to agree or to provide any coherent answers.

Tim's book is an interest study in how he and the youths he worked with grew and developed, how he worked out strategies to deal with truants (his policy was to keep them busy and not phone the Educational Welfare Officer) how to deal with officialdom, and how to deal with the ever-shifting rules and regulations that government (local and national) kept imposing on both youth workers and youths. Including the OFSTED regimen.

If you are interested in the history of youth work and youth culture, this book is for you.

It's published by Matador at £8.99.

 

The Journal

In The Journal readers of this novel from R. D. Stevens are faced with a major dilemma. What can a person do when they lose the only person they actually, really care for?

Ethan Willis is, at 18, a rather confused young person. He has embarked on a mission, a quest if you will, to try to locate his older sister, Charlotte.

She vanished whilst she was journeying through South East Asia.

He loves his sister and admires her for her spontaneous nature, her individualistic attitude and her understanding of the world.

In order to try to find her, he enters the world pf backpack travelling. He follows something. What is it? Perhaps it is a ghost? Might it even be the ghost of his sister, Charlotte?

He sojourns into rural Cambodia, the deepest, most remote parts of Laos and, eventually, to the party islands of Thailand.

By happenstance, he finds her journal and he is able to retrace her journey. Reading the journal rings about flashbacks to their childhood. He thinks deep thoughts abut the nature of existence, about truth, beauty and even the meaning of meaning itself.

He wonders about their relationship and why she might have vanished.

Eventually he learns of a place where Charlotte might., actually, be.

Dare he follow her to that place? would be, really, be ready to meet her, at last?

Who will, actually, be found?

It's an interesting book that takes an existential look at life.

It's published by Matador at £9.99.

The Odyssey of a Sound Recordist

In the book The Odyssey of a Sound Recordist we meet Malcolm Stewart.

This is his story, published posthumously.

His story begins back in the early days of radio. It's 1944, television had been suspended for the duration of the war, the BBC Home Service held sway and one of the chaps changing the discs in the studios in Broadcasting House was 15-year-old East End boy, Malcolm Stewart.

He had, as it happens, just embarked on a career that would see him leave the poverty of the East End and the drabness of life in wartime London behind him.

He found his way on to the Continent of Europe where he would work in Hamburg for Forces Broadcasting, a billet that saw him placed in charge of former SS officers. as a byproduct of this posting and the subsequent security clearance this earned him, he drew the attention of the CIA.

The writing of his story resulted from him recovering from a serious medical condition that he fell victim to in his 70s, whilst on a cruise through Central America. The survival rate was only 20% and he realised that as he had lived such a varied and interesting life, it would be a pity to allow all that he had experienced and lived through to go to waste.

His wife brought his laptop into the hospital and he began to write down what would, eventually, become this book.

Her served in the RAF and flew with members of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Although he and his friend Mike Beavis shouldn't have done so, as they were actually only in the ATC and only schoolboys!

Incidentally Mike Beavis eventually became Sir Michael Beavis, Air Chief Marshall! In correspondence with Malcolm he reminisced about the 100 hours of flyingtime he gained before he was 16 as a member of the ATC including 8 hours "stick time" as a co-pilot of B17 Flying Fortresses!

Malcolm left school a year early and began work at the BBC at Daventry where he was employed in the control room to monitor the audio output of the various shortwave transmitters that were based there.

He joined the RAF and served from 1947 to 1950, training at RAF Bridgnorth in Shropshire, then a main training station for the RAF.

Eventually he worked on some of the top British films of the 20th century, got deported as a suspected spy from Cuba and had to flee through the jungles of Ghana with the assistance of the CIA.

In his garden shed he launched a company called Audio Systems. From these somewhat humble origins his company would rival both Pinewood and Shepperton Studios for the sound services they provided.

Malcolm, it was, who developed the world's first portable multitrack sound recording device.

From the film/movie industry he moved over into the world of television news, where he covered some of the top news stories of the 1980s. He enjoyed a long and illustrious career, hobnobbing with world statesmen, senior political figures and film stars and celebrities of all types. Margaret Thatcher was on first name terms with him.

He was presented with an official IRA press pass when he worked for TF1,  there was the Russian spy who bought his used Saab.

After he had closed Audio Systems he became non-executive chairman of De Lane Lea studios. Unfortunately his failing eyesight meant that he had to retire several years later.

He also worked for the American outfit ABC, did some work for CBS.

He lived a full and extremely varied life and is well illustrated throughout and this book is a "must read" for anyone who enjoys a well-written biography.

It's published by Matador at £18.99 in hardback.

Was It Worth It?

In Was It Worth It? readers will follow the journey of one family from Poland to Ottawa.

Written by Liliana Arkuszewska, this is a heartwarming story of the struggles of one family from Poland.

The 1980s brought great changes to the country of Poland. Recently freed from the Soviet Union's Iron Curtain, millions of Polish citizens fled from their moribund country to seek a better, more fulfilling life in a variety of foreign countries.

But no matter where she travelled, Liliana still knew that her heart belonged to Poland.

Eventually,  however, the writing was on the wall and with the situation in Poland becoming worse and worse, she realised that the time to emigrate permanently with her husband and three-year-old child, plus her sister and brother-in-law, had come.

And so they left Poland for a new life in Ottawa, Canada.

Was It Worth It? is her story. A story of trials, tribulations, of adventures and fun.

Was It Worth It? Read her fascinating and extremely well-written story and find out for yourself.

It's published on the 28th July at £19.99.

Betrayed

In Betrayed, the latest novel from science fiction author Geoffrey Arnold, readers rejoin the Quantum Twins.

This is the third novel in the series that saw he Twins torn away from Vertazia and placed on the planet Earth a full thousand miles apart, bereft of their telepathic link.

Fearing that the twins could return to Vertazia and spread the "Human Violence Virus" the rulers of Vertazia have, with unconscious irony, began using utterly unacceptable degrees of violent behaviour to stop the friends of the Twins from effecting a rescue mission.

In Betrayed we join Qwelby as he enteres the fifth dimension, his mission is to free Tullia from imprisonment.

In his second awakening Qwelby finds love, yet tullia is troubled by bloody knife fights.

He manages to shoot his way out of danger, the Twins are able to reconnect, but before he can do anything, Qwelby is captured by the Professor.

Meanwhile, the situation on Vertazia is becoming fraught, with two key rulers plotting against one another, both have decided to use 16-year-old Xaala. But Xaala has plans of her own and corrupts their plans for her own nefarious ends.

Xaala plans to capture the heart of one of the Twins and to destroy the other. But what for? What is her real aim?

There are journeys on a pirate ship, and the Twins must return to their home world to teach the truths they have learned on the planet Earth, in order to save their own planet.

But hat will happen? Will the Twins be doomed to living on the planet Earth for good? And what of the Professor, of Tullia and Qwelby?

This book is published by Matador at £12.99.

Please note on this occasion if you buy this book at the publisher's online bookshop, there is a discounted price of £10.00 if you use the code "BETRAYED" in the appropriate box.
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/sci-fi/betrayed-1897/

Windows 96

In Windows 96 author Cal Holmes takes her readers back to the year 1996.

We meet Alex. Alex is a teenage boy who spends his days dormant in the den in the garage, smoking diope and dreaming of the time when he will be able to cast all this aside and travel the world.

But there's a bit of a problem, really. Lack of money = no travelling anywhere, least of all the world!

However, Alex meets up with Fox who is a double glazing salesman, who brings Alex news of another lifestyle. The lifestyle of the double glazing salesman!

Knocking on doors with the coldest of cold canvasing, daytimes spent in the boozer, nights out in somewhat less salubrious pubs.

There was Brigette, beautiful, but cool and aloof, Brigette, in the Baston telesales department, he fancied her, but she wasn't in the slightest bit interested. Or was she?

Pretty soon Alex is finding out that things at home between his parents weren't all that he had thought they were, his finances are running on empty and he finds himself spiralling into a life of crime whilst sharing a rundown flat with his double glazing sales colleagues.

Can he get out of the rat run of double glazing sales, too many visits to pubs and nightclubs and the grotty shared flat?

If he can, where would he go? Could he jet off to explore the world? If he can, who would he go with? Who would get his Playstation, who would get his car?

This is a wry and amusing look back at a not that distant piece of our history and it's clear that the author has seen the world of double glazing sales from the seedy inside.

It's published by Matador at £7.99.