Gooseberry is released

Today’s the day, the day the novel goes on sale. So far I’ve had a fabulous response to Gooseberry from LTER reviewers, who really seem to have taken the little chap into their hearts. It’s had a massive re-edit, which it needed, and now sports UK English spellings and punctuation as a result of one such review from a reader in California. See their reviews at LibraryThing.

I knew fairly early on when I was writing Gooseberry that there would be at least one sequel and quite possibly a whole series. Characters like Mr. Bruff, George and George, Julius, Bertha, and Mr. Crabbit—good Lord, even the detestable Misss-ter Chrisss-topher—deserve the long-term character development that only a series can provide.

So what can you, the reader, expect of Octopus, the next instalment of Send for Octavius Guy? I see promotion in the offing for young Gooseberry, while Julius’s spoken English continues to deteriorate nicely under Bertha’s dubious care. The Georges’ “reducing” diets begin to take effect (or not), and Mr. Crabbit relaxes his policy on receipts. Actually, you can strike that last one. Gooseberry and Julius find themselves adopted by a dog, and man arrives from Glasgow claiming to be the pair’s father. I would have liked Gooseberry to have taken Julius to a piano recital of Bach—but instead he ends up taking both him and Bertha to the theatre, in this case a revival of the Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi at Sadler’s Wells. The duchess is strangled to death in Act 4, but revives briefly, causing Bosola, the character who witnesses this, to remark, ‘Her eye opes!’ I imagine most readers of Gooseberry will know exactly what Bertha makes of this! I’m aiming to release it on July 1st next year. It’s a tight schedule, but I think I can do it.

Next summer’s project, which I hope to serialize on Goodreads, will be set in the Lake Taupo region of New Zealand during the 1870s and 1880s. Hopefully it will be the first of three novels to explore how our sense of national identity was eventually forged. It’s based on historical events and characters that I’ve spent the past three years researching. I do hope you’ll join me then.

Michael