Books

A woman alone, a clandestine immigrant on the run and a journalist looking for a story he’s going to wish he’d never found.

In the early hours, the young woman steals through the deserted streets towards the harbour to meet her fiancé, for Lilla and Enzo are running away to a new life in America. Yet, two obstacles stand in their way. The first they have foreseen, for as everyone knows Don Carmelo Ruggieri will stop at nothing to prevent his son eloping with the daughter of a lowly fisherman. And the second, which no one could predict, is the 'Terremoto dei Terremoti'; for the date is 28th December 1908, the day Providence has chosen to tear down the great city of Messina.

Young journalist Simon Peckham is seeing the New Year in at a London nightclub when he first notices Soraya, the daughter of an Iraqi refugee. His evening isn’t going to plan, so he steps out to get some air and watches as paramedics attend to an old rough sleeper, Tom, in an alley close by. The next morning at the local hospital, Simon enquires after Tom’s condition and is surprised to meet Soraya, who tells him that 3 men had assaulted both her and Tom, and that a second rough sleeper came to their rescue.

The Truth in Fiction is a collection of eighteen short stories written and collated over the last ten years. Many of them are stories written about the streets of London, the cities of Europe and locations as far afield as the mountains around Wanaka in the South Island of New Zealand.

Arriving on the unspoiled island of Lipari, off the coast of Sicily, Ric Ross carries with him a letter of introduction to Valeria Vaccariello, an ageing star of Italian cinema who lives alone in the House of Strangers; a woman known locally as la strega – the witch.

“Some come to Strand-next-the-Sea to visit the stately homes, stroll along the promenade or paddle in the cool waters of the North Sea. Others come because they are drawn by the secrets of their past...”

"He had heard the spirits calling his name from the maquis and he had heard their footfalls as they passed by his window in the night. The spirits had summoned him. He could not deny them."