Andy Conway has a plan. Publish 11 novels by 11/11/11. He's halfway there and it's only October 1st.
Why is he doing it?
Is it Olympian? Is he purloining his own back pages? How's he going to do that?
And who the hell is Andy Conway anways?
In a race to the finish now, he looks disturbingly comfortable. His composure is sinister. Like he's decided to do us in, he knows it, he knows how he's going to do it but hasn't shared his secret yet. How we hate that.
Anyway. Check out these titles, (with virtual jacket blurbs borrowed from his Amazon page...) this is where he has gotten to so far. The ones I've read took my breathe away, uncomfortably, and I can't wait to read the others. He's like a British Wells Tower, he is, and if you don't know wtf I mean, well, I mean that's beyond good.
Train Can't Bring Me Home
1993. The former eastern bloc is open for business and a war is raging just over the border, but in a Hungarian campus town, a group of students and exiles escape into love and literature.
Dylan, a washed up American lecturer with a Tom Waits fixation, has an affair with Erzsi, his vivacious teenage Hungarian student, and a mixed group of students and teachers spend a crazy spring falling in love with their town and each other, their affair transforming everyone around them and turning the entire town into a magical place.
(Kindle Version £2.14)
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?
The Very Thought of You is a timeslip ghost story novella about a young man's obsession with Amy, the dead wife of an old man he visits.
Community visitor Jez is assigned Harold, a cantankerous old codger who takes a venomous delight in confrontation and lives in a house that is falling down around him. But when Jez starts to see Amy's ghost and finds himself propelled into the house's secret past, his obsession with her threatens his hold on the present.
The Very Thought of You is a moving, evocative meditation on love and betrayal and the persistence of memory.
(Kindle Version £0.86p)
The Girl With A Bomb Inside
1981. School is shit, Ian Curtis, your hero just killed himself and your girlfriend's pregnant.
Tony is 15 and he's in trouble. It's not that he secretly reads James Joyce and his schoolmates would kill him if they found out what a freak he was. It's not that he's trying to write his story and can't find the right voice. It's that his girlfriend, Janine, is pregnant, and in a couple of months everyone will know and his life will be over. So he's decided to end it himself.
(Kindle Version £0.86p)
The Strikers Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley.
Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man City last won a trophy, and for 35 years it's been failure for both of them. City have won nothing since, and he's exiled in Birmingham, temping in a job he hates and living with an ex who hates him. But success might be on the horizon. City are heading for an FA Cup final and Ewan knows he has to get a ticket, get a career and get a girl before it happens or forever accept that he's the jinx, and that the gloating '35 Years' banner at Old Trafford is more about him than City.
The Striker's Fear of the Open Goal is a desperate, comic look at how a football team can be the most depressing thing in a man's life... and the only thing worth living for.
(Kindle Version £3.44)
Meet Me in Monmartre
English girl Sandy travels to Paris on New Year's Eve for a blind date with her French pen friend, but ends up being entertained by elderly barman Claude when her date doesn't show up.
Meet Me in Montmartre is a delightfully romantic short story from the forthcoming collection, Lovers in Paris.
(Kindle Version £0.86p)
Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest... Make a movie... Have an affair.
Ten years ago, a group of students fell in love with each other and had their perfect moment. Now screenwriter Nathan Beck is back in Budapest to shoot a movie about it.
But his return stirs up memories for the old Breakfast Club survivors trying to cope in this city now their perfect moment is over.
(Kindle Version £3.44)
There's a Kindle reader for almost every platform available or buy the box and set your apartment shelves free, here.
More Andy Conway Week in Outsideleft:
An Introduction
Train Can't Bring Me Home
Happy Shopper!
