Best wishes to all my followers from a rather soggy Isle of Wight. We´re having a strange August, aren´t we? One day we´re sweltering under record temperatures and the next we´re getting washed away by a violent thunderstorm. It´s a bit less extreme here because of the moderating influence of the sea, but it´s another message to us to take global warming seriously. Maybe in the next news I´ll float some of my ideas about avoiding the use of fossil fuels in future.

On the writing front, I have now published “The Property People” as both an e-book and a paperback. It should be especially interesting to readers who know and love East Devon. That is the area which R F Delderfield made so popular in his novels, particularly in the trilogy “A Horseman Riding By”. In a way one might say this novel follows on from his series, although the narrative and the descriptions are more in tune with modern tastes.

Volume 1 (Riversmeet) is a giant of a book – more than 150,000 words and 450 pages in the paperback version (twice the length of a standard novel). For that reason I have had to price it a little higher than my other books. At the moment it is only available through Amazon, but I hope to release it through Waterstones and    W H Smith if initial sales are encouraging.

Because the people who usually do my covers are too busy, I have designed the cover myself. It is based on a photo I took of a local property which reminded me of the Riversmeet House in the novel. I am quite pleased with it for an amateur. A copy is attached and I would be interested to hear what you think of it.