I am delighted to report this week that my fourth novel, Governing Passions, is now available for pre-order, ahead of its formal publication on 1 June. The book is the second in a series Love in a Changing Climate but it’s a stand alone novel that can be read on its own.
I’ve been around politics and government all my adult life, in one form or another – initially through my own political activities as a teenager and student. In mid-life, I spent a long time as a journalist and analyst reporting on transport policy, and later as a consultant, I worked in an advisory capacity for governments at local, devolved and national level.
I have therefore long wanted to write a political novel of some sort: as a young man, I was been fascinated by such books. I loved the novels of C P Snow, especially Corridors of Power. One novel by long-serving Labour MP Maurice Edelman, Who Goes Home? has always stuck in my mind. Later, I discovered the timeless Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope.
Meanwhile, I was also contemplating another plot about two guys, friends at University but driven apart by a problem of sexuality, who were suddenly thrown together again in their professional lives fifteen years later – very much a ‘what if?’ plot drawn from an incident in my own student days.
Then, in the summer of 2018, the Brexit referendum result and the political upheavals that followed, coupled with the plot that was already swirling about in my mind suddenly gelled into one coherent whole, and the story of the young politician Dan Forrester and his University friend Luke Carter began to take shape.
We did meet Luke in the first novel in the series, A Year of Awakening, but it was only a fleeting appearance. As this book opens, he has been working as a Senior Consultant with the small consultancy firm Pearson Frazer for five years and is about to be promoted to Associate Director, working with his boss Steve Frazer on a major government contract.
As you may have seen from earlier blogs, this book has been a long time in the making. I started writing it back in the autumn of 2018, and finished the first draft almost exactly a year later. Two main reasons – the first was the disruption to everything caused by our decision to move house last year, and the second was the length of the book – that first draft, at 120,000 words, was the longest I’d written and twice the length of my previous book, Veering off Course.
The draft was refined with help from my two beta readers Kirsten and Jill, and then went off to my editor, Karen Holmes, just before Christmas. It came back at the end of January, but the news was not good. She was less impressed, and thought the book had several problems. Putting them right involved some more hard work cutting, plot reworking and refining – but at the end of it, the second draft emerged and, I’m pleased to say, received Karen’s enthusiastic stamp of approval!
So here we are, with a cover designed and ready (big thank you to Garrett at Black Jazz Designs), typesetting complete, all ready to go. It’s written in the first person, with alternating voices for the two main characters and is around 113,000 words long. You can read more about the story in the article Governing Passions - and this will also tell you how to order your copy.
In this liberal, liberated age, it may seem strange to some people to see characters still struggling with their sexuality and fearful of the consequences of ‘coming out’. But we know from the testimony of many people that it is still the case and the reasons for it can be many and complex. I’ve tried to explore some of those in the book, as well as the pressures on modern politicians, who face endless detailed scrutiny (and a good deal of hostility) on 24-hour news and in social media.
Anyway, I hope that you will read the book – and judge for yourself whether or not I’ve succeeded!
I had a great time writing this story about Dan and Luke and their friends and colleagues: I am very much looking forward to returning to some of the characters in a third book in the series sometime in the next few months.
For now, my focus is very much on Steering for Freedom, the second volume of The Navigation Quartet, and I’m roughly halfway through the first draft.