You think you've got problems.
My favourite Afghan restaurant closed down. My girlfriend left. A bad-tempered lawyer named Keziah crashed her car into mine. And we couldn't even die properly.
The afterlife turned out to be a cage in the heavens where we lived with all our memories, and where evil spirits wanted us to build a perfect life together. Then they could use us to market-test new products.
Or, we could rot eternally in the yellow sleet outside our cage. Which honestly was tempting. But then a snake with a personality disorder offered us a way out..
Paradise - a Divine Comedy fearlessly crosses life, death, heavenly dimensions and extreme Afghan cuisine and faces our greatest problem - ourselves.
Reviews:
''Hitchhikers Guide meets Screwtape meets Pilgrims Progress meets the Discworld!' (Phil Grasham)
'...absolutely loved it. A hysterical surrealist take on what is out there after life on earth, or next to life on earth, or simultaneous with life on earth, or whatever. A story of Gods in kilts, crystal clear memories, and walls made of our pixelated fears. Delightful. (Jeannette M, Goodreads.com)
Sometimes you want to hit the main character on the back of the head and tell him to stop being a wuss, but how would you react if you had to build a paradise controlled by some used-car-salesman-style gods? If you like quirky and surreal stories about the afterlife, then I would highly recommend Paradise. (Katie Webb, Goodreads.com)
What a great book! Loved the characters, the creativity, the dialogue, the imaginative idea of evil spirits keeping humans as pets .... a delightfully comic but definitely insightful look into the human psyche and soul. It's a mark of a good book (for me, at least) when I look forward to picking it up again to read and am slow to put it down. I loved every aspect of it. (Susan Sutton, author)
An interview with Glenn Myers
Q. So what is this book like and what books do you like the most?
A. Off-beat, quirky. British humour I guess. About the afterlife or at least about near-death experiences and the soul.
Q. Why this subject?
A. What are we like on the inside? If your soul was like a landscape, what would it look like? How would it change? What would be attacking it or wearing it down? I thought it would be a lot of fun to picture that.
Q. And you get to ask big questions?
A. I think the best comedy does. Life, death, love, redemption: all those, but handled lightly. I see comic fiction like a ridge walk on a mountain range -- scary drops each side, but a carefree stroll on the top.
Q. With two warring characters at the heart?
A. Three actually. The main protagonist Jamie is at war with Keziah the girl who crashed into him and so sent them both to the afterlife. If he's smug, laid-back and bone idle, she's spiky, focussed and driven. They just don't get on. There's no possible world, living or dead, where they could ever get on. Yet they have to work together. And hovering in the background is Jamie's ex-girlfriend Caroline, who he's completely failed to love and she's left him. So they're all lost souls. And of course the stress of being dead, of your soul exposed, and of being experimented on by evil spirits. Such wonderful fun to write!
Q. There's a lot of food mentioned in the books: Afghan (murtabak), Indian (for example, roti prata), Singaporean Chinese (Hainanese Chicken Rice) and Malay (Mee Goreng, Laksa, Nasi Lemak). Have you eaten all these foods?
A. Yes. It's important -- vital research.
