Böcker av Graeme Sparkes

When Alan's mother rings to beg him to return to the family home for the final weeks of his father's life, he baulks, unwilling to be around the man who tried to control every moment of his childhood and adolescence. But he is at the sick man's bedside when his father makes an extraordinary request. Alan is tempted but does he follow through?Smothered is the coming of age story of a socially isolated young man told with unsparing skill and sympathetic insight.Alan grows up in a baffling world of stifling normality. His father, Tosh, is an ambitious man of more energy than talent; his mother is a caring woman who accepts the necessity of being seen to respect a conventional life. As he struggles to find purpose and worth, Alan is drawn through a tangle of drugs, self-harm, and self-serving friendships, always unable to free himself from the quagmire of family life and expectation. His final confrontation with his father and his past is both terrifying and consoling.Smothered is a work of great understanding, told with skill, humour, and compassion.

Frank Munro has had change thrust upon him. So he's changing. He's trying.An award winning journalist, now put out to pasture, Frank is looking to renew his purpose, renew his life, and save the woman he loves from her disastrous infatuation.Can a conversation with a dead man on Macaulay Station point the way?Graeme Sparkes has written an initmate and complex novel portraying the inner turmoil of a man whose outer world is falling apart. An unflinching but generous examination of the torment of a man struggling to retain meaning in his life.