Deaf Wish

About Geoff Cook

Sometimes the life choices we make and the simple necessities of making our way in the world detract from our natural bents and inclinations. I suspect that a wiser head might have seen the efforts of a nine year old boy in post-war Britain to set up a street library and local children's newspaper as a pointer to a possible career development. Regrettably, such was not the case and the desire to plant a fertile imagination on a sheet of plain paper gave way to the ambitions of personal and professional objectives in other spheres. The silver lining in having spent a lifetime accumulating a sizeable collection of T shirts from life experiences and ventures extending from the UK to Spain, Portugal and Brazil is the access to knowledge and ideas invaluable to me as I finally began a serious writing career.

My experience embraced professional accounting (not quite as boring as it sounds when you're sitting in an office in the middle of the Amazon; the ACs broken; the temperature's forty plus; the sweat runs down your finger and obliterates everything you've just written, when, suddenly, a snake comes wriggling across the floor and wraps itself around your chair leg), investment banking, pop music management (you try and tell Ozzie Osbourne to take his tax return seriously), then, into the management of a ceramic tile factory in the Welsh Valleys, a chain of retail shops, operating a restaurant ship in London's Dockland, a leisure complex on the Algarve and, finally, when almost out of breath, cheffing in and running a chain of restaurants. After all this and three long-term relationships, life has certainly never been boring and when the time came to set pen to paper, there was never any shortage of ideas.

My first full length novel, Pieces for the Wicked, was very much a toe in the water exercise in 2010 and submerged without too many waves. But it taught me a great deal. I followed up with two three act plays, both with a strong Portuguese bias. The first, Painful Truths, is currently with the National Theatre in Lisbon and I'm hoping it will be translated, re-edited and performed within the next year. A sort of sequel, The Last Chapter is waiting in the wings.

In 2017, I released my second full length novel, The Sator Square, a thriller based on a terrorist plot to take out a member of the Royal family. It has been well received and I am looking to republish it with a different cover and contemporary conclusion in 2020. My current novel (release date October 2019) is Deaf Wish, a story of adultery, deceit, betrayal and murder set in three locations (not unsurprisingly you may think) of Wales, Northern Portugal and Spain's Costa de la Luz. The story tells of a lonely old man's attempt to find reconciliation with the wife and sons he deserted sixteen years earlier and a chain of events as his past life and the lives of the people around him begin to unravel as he searches for redemption in a climate of hostility and revenge. It's a wapping 464 pages (450 if you cut out the front and back blurb), a story of adultery, infidelity, revenge and the destructive consequences of betrayal on both transgressor and victims. Of course, it's fiction. On one bookseller's site alone, there are over 800 titles in the Adultery and Infidelity section, most dealing with cause and effect, some humorous, most untangling the complexity of emotions and a few classics amongst them. It's a popular subject for authors.

Hopefully, the reader will find my offering a riveting read or, at worst, a cure for insomnia, but writing the book (all 145,000 words) has been a cathartic experience and, putting the fiction aspect to one side, has taught me the importance of valuing relationships and always looking for the positives that once encouraged you, whenever your resolve is being tested.

My anti-hero couldn't do it and look where he's ended up. 

Deaf Wish

Published: 15 October 2019 - Publisher: Rotercracker Copyrights 

Fiction 145,000 word count - Fiction; Contemporary; Adult Fiction; Mystery; Thriller; Mystery>Crime; Suspense; Drama Keywords: Adultery; Infidelity; Adult Sexual Content; Incest; Betrayal; Revenge; Murder; Spain and Portugal; Deafness; Lip reading; Memory Loss For a more detailed look, go to my website:- www.geoff-cook.com