Books I have written

They say that everyone has at least one book in them. And nowadays, thanks to sites like lulu.com, everyone can publish that book.

I have two to my credit and you are very welcome to read them.

A Good Inheritance is the novel that more or less wrote itself! If I had set out to write a novel, I would have chosen a setting that I knew rather more about. But I did not choose the Pascoes; they chose me and commissioned me to write their story. They were so insistent that I had little option but to tag along behind them and learn about their world as I went along. It took twelve years and much reading both on- and offline before it was finished. Over those years, the whole cast of characters became good friends of mine, among them: Tom Pascoe, the shy, modest, damaged Union soldier who became (briefly) a friend of General Lee Laura Beth Travis, the spirited Southern woman he married Lee, their elder son, charming and irresponsible, yet ultimately heroic Henry, their younger son, a high-minded atheist and homosexual Lizzie and Harriet, Lee’s daughters, whom Henry adopts after his brother’s brutal murder by the Ku Klux Klan Cal McCarthy, Henry’s deeply religious Irish lover and Lizzie’s best friend Dr Bernard Frick, Lizzie’s Jewish husband, and their children, Nick, Tom and C.B. Stella, the English girl whom Nick woos and wins during World War II.

Read an extract
You can buy A Good Inheritance as a paperback from www.lulu.com or as an ebook from Amazon.

Do you want to know more about Linux? Have you ever wondered if you should perhaps give it a try? One of the most striking things about the Linux operating system is the affection that its users feel for it. Microsoft Windows may dominate the desktop market as far as sheer numbers are concerned, but it inspires very little actual love among its myriad users. This book sets out to explore that riddle in depth. It shows how the world of free software works and why it is such a good deal for users. Then the remarkably simple internal structure of a Linux system is explained. Readers can see how each part works and how the whole thing hangs together. For far too long people have been forced to use complex systems that they do not understand because the internal workings have been deliberately concealed in the name of commercial secrecy. The charm of Linux is that it puts you back in the driving seat. View contents

The Charm of Linux is available as a paperback from www.lulu.com.