The catalogue...
Because one day you might want to say "I read him before he became well-known"...
Well, I can dream..! In the interim, a one-off orchestra-size piece of trumpet-blowing…
Novels and Novellas
17 Alma Road - (new in 2024!)
A house filled with history and secrets is more than mere bricks and mortar; not only a mirror on the past, it can also be a window to the future.
“masterful..soul-searching. I would have liked to live next door to Owen and Maddie; I feel we would have been friends” – Siobhan Gifford
“a dextrously woven story of how the complexities of any given life remain with us, and remain too within the bricks and mortar that bore witness” – Jonty Pennington-Twist
”a beautifully crafted story” – Janet Burl
Tilt -
Take four strangers arriving in London on the same train one weekday morning, then follow them as their various endeavours sees them criss-cross the capital before they take the same service north later in the day.
Will the injured sportsman be given a clean bill of health – or will he leave the capital more uncertain of his future than ever?
Will the ambitious PA be successful in her interview – or find she is unable to free herself from the shackles of her past life?
Will the repentant brother be rewarded with the forgiveness of his siblings or a longed for reacquaintance with God?
Will the egotistical playwright rise above the disappointment of a commercial ‘flop’ to reaffirm his course to self-anointed greatness?
Or will the City – and Life – beat them all down, four characters struggling to defeat the insistent demands of living?
A group of five friends who, some thirty years after they lived and worked in the same town, come back together to honour an old friend who has recently died. The weekend is intended as a celebration but merely serves to reignite old emotions and uncover long-held secrets.
“Sally Rooney meets Henry James” – Jim Friedman
“this honest exploration of human nature helped me understand myself better” – Ann Pelletier-Topping
“a story that questions the whole idea of friendship and the notion that we can ever really know anyone” – Janet Philo
“a deeply engaging book…every moment of dialogue and recollection is thoroughly believable” – David Punter
Her voice is a trigger; a voice which forces Neil to relive the crises and failures of his past, and which offers him the possibility of a positive new future. But before he can decide on what he wants the life ahead of him to look like – and her role in it – he must pass judgement on himself.
We often encounter difficulty when trying to reconcile our memories of events with what actually happened. In the almost inevitable mis-match, our mind plays tricks on us, and what we have recently learned and how we have recently lived gets in the way and colours the past.
Pressed to recall his own life, the challenge of juggling myth and reality is dangerously fraught for Luke – especially given the story of his remarkable emotional high, and the catastrophe which followed it.
Liam is haunted by his age and the history it forces upon him. Yet he is also plagued by the need to make more – to generate new memories to recall later, before it gets too late, especially when his wife of over thirty years turns his world upside down, as does the woman he meets in an anonymous hotel dining room.
Against a background of domestic parental turmoil, his daughter fights her own demons to try and make sense of her place in a disintegrating family and the wider world.
Much of our lives is enslaved by the act of remembering – but sometimes it is about the opposite of that…
Life weaves its magic of triumphs and disappointments everywhere, and often those burdened with more than their fair share of tragedy can feel lost and alone.
Even in a quiet coastal backwater such as Maunston Quay, people like Lewis Airy struggle with their personal tragedies and grief. And when Anna arrives, evidently trying to come to terms with the cruel twist life has dealt her, she seems at first yet another individual to have found herself washed-up in the village.
But Anna proves to be more than that, and not only for herself.
Against all the odds, perhaps Maunston Quay is the kind of place to offer the second chances that give hope to everyone.
“My new year started with reading Ian’s novel, At Maunston Quay, and it was perfect. I had forgotten that for the last two years I have bounced between quarantined home life and fitful re-entries into social settings. Ian’s book grounded me with slow, gentle reminders that our connections with ourselves, our environment, and each other can heal in miraculous ways. Ian, thank you for this gift! You made me cry on the subway!” – Ruth, a US reader
Given his profession as a Historian, it was inevitable that Mark would find himself one day writing the story of his late father, the acclaimed author Charles Packard. As his biographer, Mark is blessed with a wealth of material: first-hand experience, his father’s own work, testimonies of his Aunt, and Charles’ friends, colleagues and enemies.
Yet what he uncovers is unexpected, elements of his father’s life resonating with his own. These parallels begin to intrude in a very tangible way on Mark’s interpretation of own his life, his own history becoming more closely aligned to that of his father.
Instead of being the closing of a chapter, a sealing up of the past, the biography proves to be something far darker, unleashing personal daemons that Mark could never have anticipated.
What do you most need when facing a complete disintegration of the life you have been leading? Where does the loss of your job, the betrayal of your wife, lead you?
Well, in Neville’s case to a small tea shop at the foot of the Malvern hills. But if he has gone there for some peace, some solitude, the chance to assess his situation and get his life back in order, then he is in for a shock. Is it madness that makes his coffee cup keep magically refilling, or the china geese on the wall try and fly away? And how could it be possible that a stale slice of Black Forest Gateaux would suddenly be able to offer him Agony Aunt advice?
Guided by Samuel, an aged coach driver (in his equally aged coach!), follow Neville as his travels take him to Paris, to the Derby at Epsom, dancing on a cruise ship, and into outrageous and dangerous adventures – and towards an unlikely romance that might just save his life…
Losing Moby Dick and Other Stories -
Three novellas: Losing Moby Dick, Riding the Escalators, and Writing to Gisella.
Short Story Collections
An Irregular Piece of Sky contains fifteen contemporary stories in which we meet characters who are trying to come to terms with loss and grief, the potential of love, their histories, and the opportunities the future may offer them.
We are all connected. There are links – like links in a chain – that join each of us, everyone to everyone else.
“Degrees of Separation” is a series of short stories, each tied to the next it through one of its two characters. The book’s invisible thread weaves its way across geography and time until the circle is made complete when a character from the first story appears again in the final one.
But each story is also a narrative about separation in its own right; a wife from a husband, a son from a father, a friend from a friend. “Degrees of Separation” explores what it means to be apart, and considers the things that can divide us – or potentially keep us together.
Secrets & Wisdom started life in 2016 as a project with a specific design. The idea was to write a series of short stories, each based on one of the traditional Olympian Gods and on one or more of their individual characteristics. In addition, each story would contain within it either a ‘secret’ held close by the protagonist, or the demonstration – or otherwise! – of ‘wisdom’ / self-knowledge in some form or other.
Over time, as the original project progressed, the reworking of some additional material – both modern and ancient – appeared to lend itself to the general theme, and so the notion was born to expand the brief of ‘Secrets & Wisdom’ and to create a slightly wider and more eclectic collection of short stories.
From the original project, “Angela”, “Anne”, “Hester”, “Hobart” and “Westminster” have made it into this volume (the remaining seven Gods currently lie dormant until they are awoken at some point in the future!).
Poetry
Grimsby Docks - (new for 2024!)
In the mid-19th century, Grimsby docks was perhaps the most modern such facility in Britain, its fishing boom occurring during the latter part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Indeed, right up until the 1960s the docks was a lively, thriving place.
Sixty years later, and fewer than one hundred of the area’s Victorian buildings remain; three quarters of these are unoccupied – or impossible to now occupy. Although some regeneration of the part of the docks known as ‘The Kasbah’ is being pursued, this area of Grimsby is now one of the most deprived wards in the country.
Grimsby Docks is a modern-day examination of this once thriving industrial landscape through photography and poetry.
Crash -
What happens during the last thirty minutes of your life as you struggle to wake from sleep one final time?
Does the entirety of your life indeed ‘flash before your eyes’, or are there just a few random incidents and moments which insist on being replayed and resolved?
And when these too eventually begin to dissolve, what then…?
Attempting to explore a fresh and flexible poetic style, Crash was partly inspired by the work of T.S.Eliot and Samuel Beckett.
Crash was first performed by the author as a dramatic monologue at the Ripon Theatre Festival, 2023.
Imagine tackling the entirety of Shakespeare’s sonnet cannon with the aim of creating a contemporary and modern interpretation of the poems both in terms of subject and form.
Imagine starting where most poets end – with the rhyme – and beginning each new poem by stripping out every single word from each of the Sonnets except the last one on each line.
Imagine that in tackling the pieces completely the other way around, the primary question became ‘what subject will fit a poem whose lines end with these exact words?’
Imagine a collection entitled not the Sonnets, one which has borrowed its scaffolding from the Bard to produce a sonnet sequence which is something else entirely…
It does what it says on the tin…
By the time Ian Gouge went to university he had already lived in seventeen different places – houses, pre-fabs, flats, rooms of one sort or another – and all within the environs of the same two towns: Portsmouth and Gosport, on the south coast of England. No single location more than four miles from the next, between some you could have measured the distance in hundreds of yards. If you put a pin in a map for each, the resulting image would look like the aftermath of a rather well-played game of ‘pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey’.
A number of these accommodations had been emergency refuges provided by the Local Authority to stave off homelessness; two the 60s/70s equivalents of ‘sofa surfing’. But in reality, every single residence proved temporary. Exactly at a time when a child needed security, the very notions of ‘home’, ‘family’ – even ‘love’ – were being challenged, their meanings redefined, shaken to their core; experiences which scarred both an upbringing and the future which followed it.
In the major thread of “The Homelessness of a Child”, the poet reflects on that childhood, explores its events and repercussions. Inevitably it is both a passionate and dispassionate retelling, the latter a result of the detachment a young boy would learn to adopt in order to protect himself from the chaos of the world he was forced to inhabit.
Myths attach themselves to just about everything. This is certainly true in the case of English native trees. Pagan, mystical or religious, some of these are well-known, but others are more obscure.
In “The Myths of Native Trees”, Ian Gouge uses fragments from some of these myths as the basis for a suite of poems which are in turn mystical, lyrical.
We build our own myths too. Myths about our past – or our imagined past – and about our relationship with the world around us, real or otherwise. “The Myths of Native Trees” also teases at some of these, in some cases celebrating them, in others revelling in their inescapable opacity.
First-time Visions of Earth from Space -
When people escaped gravity and started to travel in space, astronauts were amazed by the view when they looked back at the Earth. There are many photographs of such individual moments of wonder – and captured alongside these images come anecdotes recording the difficulty the astronauts encountered in trying to describe what they were seeing. This fascinates me. Not just the inevitable challenge with language and expression, but also the compulsion to depict and interpret in the first place.
In a way, Poets face the same struggle. We strive to communicate that which is – and can only be – an intensely personal experience, and in so doing, make it accessible, universal. In attempting to understand something within ourselves, we hope our efforts may bring some element of enlightenment – and delight – to others.
“After The Rehearsals” is a prose poem narrative in which the poems – although they stand on their own – are akin to chapters in a work of fiction. Reading them sequentially draws the reader into the lives of the book’s characters. Writing in this way, we get to the essence behind the narrative much more readily, and uncover a story told through a composite of sharp and memorable images.
A volume that in various ways explores our place in, and relation to, history. Whilst there are similarities in theme to his collection “Human Archaeology” (which debuted at the 2017 Ripon Poetry Festival), the threads tying these pieces together are looser, more fluid
In an unusual departure, “Punctuations from History” contains brief ‘context commentaries’ that provide the reader with a foothold into the individual poems: “an attempt to offer up a literary trowel to allow the reader to get below the surface of the poem more readily”.
Overall, the collection tries to assist with unravelling notions of “how we were / or how we are now / or how we might yet be”; fragments or mirrors offered up from our ‘punctuated history’.
The themes and preoccupations of ‘Human Archaeology’ crystallised as the new poems began to gather themselves into something approaching a coherent whole. The examination of history and its artefacts is probably a wholly appropriate subject given that some of the pieces were crafted from ‘found’ material – much in the same way perhaps as an Archaeologist assembles and then displays fragments found through their excavations.
Praise for ‘Human Archaeology’:
“a compelling exploration of the meaning of memory and history” – Hamish Wilson
“an imaginative archaeology that is personal, social and cultural…an interesting, special form of poetic plate-spinning…a volume of poetry that deserves careful attention” – David McAndrew
Non-Fiction
Shrapnel from a Writing Life -