Novel Extracts
Novel Extracts
These linked pages showcase excerpts of my last novel, The Dark Numbers, and my current novels-in-progress.
The Dark Numbers was completed in May 2006. The Dark Numbers traces the lives of an estranged father and son, Billy and Gary Matheson, during the early months of 2003. Billy, a middle-ranking oil company exec with a complicated love-life, is struggling to bring his life back into a humane balance against the backdrop of corporate politics, the second Iraq War, the SARS crisis and hardening Russian attitudes to the West. Meanwhile Gary, an anarchist activist by day and office cleaner by night, is drawn ever-deeper into a dangerous world of people-trafficking gangs and anti-capitalist protesters. As both strive to find a moral footing for their tangled lives, the action ranges from Stop-the-War demonstrations in Glasgow to mass graves in the Russian Far East, culminating in the Anti-G8 protests around Lake Geneva in June 2003. Based on extensive research and first hand experience, the book addresses themes of responsibility at the personal, familial and global levels.
I am currently seeking agency representation for this work.
Line of Sight is my current novel in progress - written in Scots, it is set in Portsoy on the Nort East Coast of Scotland in the near future.
Bass is written in English and is set in the oilfields of West Africa. Bass explores issues of masculinity and of North-South personal and political relationships through the adventures of its protagonist, Willy Scott, a technician on an offshore oil rig thrown off-balance by the retirement of his hero/father-figure, ‘a genuine cowboy’ named Rob Ryker, and his infatuation with an Angolan bar-girl, Argentina, whom he meets in the course of a tragic accident at sea. A complete draft of Bass is available at 65k words. .
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