NOVELLAS
I have always liked the novella form, ever since reading Voltaire's Candide at school. I like the concentrated nature: the novella is supposed to be between 17 and 50 thousand words, so tends to stick to one plotline.
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The Enlightenment Club
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Stella Tranter aspires - not to get rich, but to live by the highest cultural and intellectual standards possible. Coming from a background where such things are not valued, it is a long and difficult journey to achieving this.
The story starts in the mid 1970s. Is the new music, punk, going to take her there? Or a different tack, an illicit romance with a cultured older man? Or just giving up, and settling down with dull but well-meaning Bobby in Dulwich?
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When she meets charismatic composer Alex, the answer to the last of these is clearly 'no'. But once you start down this path, the stakes can get very high very quickly...
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This book is full of music, and here is a playlist to go with it.
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​​“Clever, intriguing – Stella is a very good voice.”
Dame Beryl Bainbridge
(Yes, THE Dame Beryl., commenting on an earlier version of this book.)
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“Delicately written, but with big themes boiling away beneath the surface.”
DJ Taylor
Author of The Prose Factory and Kept
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The Hillwalker
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This tale of magick, love potions, vampyrs and public footpaths (and UFOs, too, obviously) is by my alter ego, Lytchett Maltravers.
Ashley Gabriel’s love for Bathsheba Neverdene is as strong as his love for the Dorset countryside. But will it prevail? She is a bit posh, after all, and he isn't. And when the mysterious Dr Aleister Crowley gets involved... Read this 30,000 word novella to find out if true love will triumph!
“Very happy for this book to take its well deserved place in between Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett on the bookshelf where my favourite reads reside.”
Sarah, Amazon Reviewer
Unexpected Alien in Bagging Area
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Another one of Lytchett's. Two newlywed supermarket checkout operatives are blissfully happy, deep in Dorset's beautiful, rolling, mystical Vale of Ugh (the locals pronounce it "Yoog"). But far across the universe, two groups of aliens are at war.
And? Well, it wouldn't be much of a story if the aliens beat the s**t out of each other and the newlyweds did what newlyweds do with each other and there was no link, would it?
So there is a link. They are lured into a UFO and given the most delicious ice cream this planet has ever known, little knowing they are being inveigled into a sinister plot to rob earth of all that makes life on it worth living...
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"Bloody hilarious!" T Hardy, Bockhampton
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"A real turn-on." Reader from Cerne Abbas
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