Floating In Space is a novel set in Manchester, 1977. It’s not a science fiction book and in a way I regret using that title because of the sci-fi implication but it seemed right at the time and represents how the main character, Stuart Hill, feels towards the end of the novel.

Like a lot of first novels, Floating In Space is semi-autobiographical and based very loosely on some of my own experiences. Many years ago I left school and started work for an insurance company and very soon the whole nine to five existence became deadly dull and I longed to be doing something more interesting. I packed in my Insurance job and spent a few months in Spain but I quickly became bored there. I do love Saturday nights out but when every night becomes a Saturday night, the whole thing loses its attraction. Back in the UK I started work as a bus conductor just as a quick way of earning money and fully intending to get a ‘proper’ job soon but I found I enjoyed my new life working different shifts and meeting new and different people as I tripped up and down the roads of Manchester.

Finding your own voice is the key to finding your way as an author and one day I decided it was time to write about the world around me and not what I was watching on television so I wrote an essay about an evening in the Busmen’s works club. It was an essay about beer and cigarettes, about playing pool and snooker and the banter of young men across the polished bar of the club and over the worn card tables.

I wrote more and more about what I saw around me and gradually realised that I could spin all this material together into a novel. I wrote the book in the first person and began to develop a colloquial talkative style which I have used ever since. I never successfully put the various parts together into a complete narrative until a few years ago on a wet rainy holiday in France when I finally wove everything into the final book that you can buy today from amazon.

I explain more about the writing and publishing process in the radio interview below.

Read an excerpt from Floating In Space here! You can read more on my Amazon page. If you’re still unsure about parting with your money, take a look at my promotional videos below.

You might be interested in another aspect of the book, the cover. Click here to hear how I designed the cover and the problems that arose when I did so.

Here’s a video in which I take a look around Manchester in 2017 and look back, remembering how it was in 1977 as well as visiting a few places that feature in the text.

And finally, this is a video where I explain the background to Floating In Space and some of my motivation in writing it as well as a little about my writing background.