In the year 2035 it's cool to be bisexual - or at least pretend to be - and cool to be young, but to be both and on holiday in France is the coolest of all. Zorn and family are at The Anders Hotel, in the little port of Roknor, whose main attraction in daytime is its crowded beach, and in the evening its many clubs. Rejoicing in recently turning sixteen, Zorn has ten days to find Holiday Love, and isn't helped by the presence of Kevin, a coarse and violent homophobe. But despite their differences, neither can escape life's challenges, and find to their dismay that our joys and sorrows come mixed and inseparable. The mid twenty-first century is a time of looking back, a time laden with much nostalgia for the past, but little money. The Great World Depression of the 2020s has seen to that. It is a time of thumbing through the music, films and fashions of the last century, a time of imitating the lost Golden Age of the 1900s. It is also the era of core language, the final perfection of politically correct speech avoiding the use of such hideously offensive words as "he" and "she," with all their built-in stereotypes, all their dangerous assumptions about gender roles and sexuality. Yet it is a time when, though all has changed, nothing has changed. The sea still surges to the distant horizon, the waves still crash to the beach, and on these daily washed sands new people act out the ancient dramas afresh. Zorn is a story of romance, adventure and coming of age in this post-apocalyptic society.
About the Author: I was born in England. Not the England of bustling London, nor even the southern counties, but the North of great industrial towns, separated by vast expanses of hills and moors, the land of "Wuthering Heights." I read a lot from childhood onwards, and attempted my first short story at age eleven. "Would you like to be an author?" a girl asked me in my teens; "there's no money in it," I replied, not from desire for wealth, but from desire for life, and travel, which require a solid job to bring in the cash. So I worked, and travelled through life, though experience, through the world, yet always the dream of the novel drifted in the back of my mind. Europe I saw, touching its worn stone, and ancient Istanbul, and crazy Rio de Janeiro; and America too, from cold Toronto to sweltering Miami, touching its chill chrome, its smooth plastic. Then the story entered my mind, lived there, grew, and kicked the sleeping dream awake, till at 8.30 pm on the thirty-first of December, 1999, I paused as I left the shower. Soon, I thought, soon the century ends, mere hours, and the novels are still only an idea. So I opened a Word file.... My first published novel is Wake of the Raven, available on Amazon, the first of a series chronicling a disastrous love affair from the early nineteen-fifties to the end of the century. I'm pleased with it, and the second in the series is partly written. But I wanted to first try something completely different, in a different style, so my latest published is Zorn, set in 2035, and tracks the lives of Zorn Mayhew and Emma Ellis, descendants of Stuart Ellis, in a changed world of the not too distant future.