Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Whole Truth - Jim Murdoch


Bio:

I’m a Scottish writer living just outside Glasgow. In the seventies and eighties my poems appeared regularly in the small press magazines that were legion at the time. By the nineties I had allowed myself to become disillusioned and stopped sending stuff out. I didn't stop writing however but moved onto novels and short stories in that order. I’ve now written five novel, two of which have been published (Living with the Truth and Stranger than Fiction) and a third (Milligan and Murphy) due out any day. I’ve also brought out a collection of poetry called This Is Not About What You Think.

Product description:

Jonathan Payne is a jaded bookseller at the end of a wasted life which has been spent in a drab English seaside town. He could be an everyman, but seems to have missed the boat somewhere. He's both distastefully pathetic and oddly sympathetic. A passive character, he’s been happy to read about life without experiencing either great joy or great despair. If Death were to knock on his door it wouldn’t trouble him greatly.

The knock comes. Only it’s not Death. It’s the truth. Literally. The human personification of truth.

Truth proves to be a likeable, if infuriating, character with a novel mode of expression: “glib dipped in eloquence and then rolled in a coating of irony,” to quote one reviewer. He knows everything and has no qualms revealing intimate details of lives of the people who cross his path; he’s quite indiscriminate. The same reviewer described him as “one of the most endearing antagonists I have come across.” Comparisons with Peter Cook’s devil in Bedazzled are not unreasonable.

Jonathan learns what he's missed out on in life, what other people think and the true nature of the universe which is nothing like he would have expected it to be. At the end, having learned far more than he ever wanted to know, he finds out that it's usually never too late to start again. Only sometimes it is: no Ebenezer Scrooge or George Bailey-esque turnaround for poor Jonathan.

Q: What will e-readers like about your book?

The fact that they’re getting two books in a single volume.

Q: Why did you go indie?

Because I don’t write books that fall into traditional genres

Q: Who are your favourite authors in your genre?

As I said I’m not a genre writer but the writers whose influences you’ll see in The Whole Truth are Keith Waterhouse, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and Alan Bennett.

Link to web site or blog or Amazon/Smashwords

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