The Timid Bookseller and the Triplets
Carthew’s for Books was the sign atop my family’s bookshop in Feilding, a small town in rural New Zealand. It’s still there. The family ran the bookshop over four generations for 115 years until my older brother sold it.
It broke my father’s heart to see the shop disappear to become a pharmacy. Thankfully, the old facade remains, but it is threatened with destruction because of earthquakes in NZ, otherwise known as “The Shaky Isles.”
Historical Fiction
So this is one reason why I have taken up writing novels from the age of 69. Two so far and more on the way. The third book will be called “The Timid Bookseller and His Triplets.” It will be different from the other two (Proud, A Tale of Rampant Ludicrousness, was semi-fantasy, historical fiction. Divine’s Choice, After the Windsors, it’s ALL BLACK, is also semi-historical, romance).
When you grow up surrounded by books and your playground after school is often the family bookshop with its lovely staff who remained for decades because my father was a benign and kind employer; the quaint upstairs which stored books and toys, and the magazine racks, from which locals ordered their weekly copies of The Women’s Weekly or monthly copy of Rugby News; that shop was a treasure trove of memories.
The Story So Far
And so, The Timid Bookseller and His Triplets will draw on these experiences.
It’s about a young orphan who longs to own a bookshop in a small town (get the picture?) and succeeds but only with the help of three identical sisters.
As it happens, the triplets bear the names Katherine (after Katherine Mansfield, arguably NZ’s most famous writer; Ngaio after Ngaio Marsh, an outstanding playwright and author; and the Janet, after Janet Frame, international author who should have been condemned to a mental hospital but was saved by her incomparable writing.
Tumultuous Period
Apart from following the lives of William, the bookseller, and the triplets, the book is also a narrative of the tumultuous period from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s and its impact on rural New Zealand, specifically the economic impact of Rogernomics on provincial towns dependant on agriculture.
The Timid Bookseller and His Triplets also focuses on the conservative values of the time, the social stigmas surrounding issues such as single mothers, and the underbelly of violence and Māori racial resentment running deeply in the New Zealand psyche at that time.
The novel is a literary tour de force (not my writing, but the subject). It twists and turns through murder, gay All Black rugby players, mystery men, the Treaty of Waitangi, Ferraris, the justice system, Maori radicals, NZ history and gets darker with the inevitable surprise ending.
Moral of the story: Write with passion from within your soul, drawing on real experiences and converting them into an enjoyable read.
