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Dr. Faysal Mikdadi:
“I wanted to write to tell you that I had not, for some time, enjoyed reading a collection of short stories as I did your This Spinning World. The pieces had me laughing, smiling and occasionally shedding a little tear.
Your book is indeed one about the ‘spinning world’ with its chaos and, more significantly, the wonderful oddity of human behaviour. It prompts many dreams in your reader once the book is put down. Even now, some stories still reverberate with images and anecdotal reveries.
Nick’s story in ‘Decolonise Your Mind’ is deeply moving on many levels...There is also a very serious message about colonialism behind it all.
What really stands out about these short stories/vignettes is our common lot as human beings...We humans are indeed an interestingly odd group of people.
Thank you for the real pleasure that this book has given me”.
Tony Troughear:
“I may be wrong in thinking this is a new kind of autobiography but that is how it struck me, a tell-all tale with a liberating fig leaf of fiction. It's a good idea and it works, and there is always the titillation of unravelling it all and establishing the real facts…
What is not forgotten is the mellow feeling that remains from it and the pleasure at looking around the edifice of the author’s presence in the flesh to the jungles of danger and excitation behind him - sort of like looking past the edges of the sky-scrapers of Nairobi out towards to the plains full of Maasai and lions”.
Dr. Faysal Mikdadi, FRSA, is a Palestinian-British poet and novelist, and Academic Director of The Thomas Hardy Society.
Tony Troughear is an Australian writer. He has worked in the media in East Africa and as a journalist in New South Wales.
Quoted with permission.
An Amazon.co.uk Customer review:
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 October 2019
I had read this author's book, The Ionian Islands and Epirus: A Cultural Landscape, so when I saw he had written a book of short stories (43 of them!), I thought I'd give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to find a multicultural feast of ideas and very relatable tales. I absolutely love Edward in the story, "January." Perhaps that is the reason the author put it in the beginning, because it pulled me into the book immediately. "Edward had managed in the past to evade the consequences of his growing personal awareness of the absurdity of life." Yes, Edward, I know how you feel. . . and now "the past" is over and it --well-- I'll let the reader decide. I also loved and related to, "In Search of Silence" as well as "The Winter before the Summer of Love" where I read Robert's and Malcolm's discussion of their entering the teaching profession and "being fed to the educational system" with a heavy sigh, but also a nodding head. There is so much in this book in addition to the stories, such as photos, illustrations, poetry, and relevant quotes. It is well worth the purchase.
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