Crossed Wires

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Possible designs for cover

Crossed Wires is an intimate portrayal of a father/son relationship based on a true story. A deception from the father’s past, which has dogged his entire life, sends ripples into the present and the future, leaving the readers questioning what they can ever know of others’ lives, even someone as close as a parent.

Karl, the father, loves to recount his wartime adventures, but do the events and actions he describes illuminate his true character or have they been shaped by exaggeration, false memory and even wilful deception? Alex, the son, visiting his father in hospital in the late nineties, struggles to make sense of these stories and his father’s life.

   
Beginning with his childhood in Weimar Germany, one narrative strand follows Karl’s fortunes through the rise of Nazism to WW2 and its aftermath. Running through the story, which often deals with defeat and loss, there is a thread of hope, of characters overcoming horrendous odds and making the most of life.
    

I have researched my father’s life and created a work of fiction around the facts I uncovered. The narration employs both a wide and close focus, encompassing the big dramatic events that shape Europe’s history and the personal, intimate events that shape individual lives and relationships. Crossed Wires is a blend of fact and fiction; many of the incidents are based on fact and expanded by imagination which, I think, gives the novel a powerful authenticity.

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