Bøger af David Mathew

People in Bedfordshire are disappearing. Two teenagers are kidnapped from a rural train station. A baby is taken from an urban market. Another baby is stolen from an encampment of Travellers. Two burglars, who have never met, break into a village home and one dies, killed by a giant wave of sea water that appears from nowhere. All the while a strange man obsesses with making a movie...whatever the cost to those around him. Another man appears to care only about the beautiful birds that he keeps in a cage... But nothing is what it seems. Ventriloquists is a story about a man who discovers a liminal space between life and death. Around him bad people desperately try to defend their appearance of civility...but to what emotional and physical cost? What does it mean when kidnappers are kidnapped? Who are the puppets? And who are The Ventriloquists?

BILLY ALFRETH IS SERVING FIVE YEARS as an inmate at Dellacotte Young Offenders Institute, in the north of England. Billy has memories of being attacked by three men, but CCTV footage doesn't bear out his account and he is locked up for stabbing one man. Billy's world overlaps with that of Ronald Dott, a serial rapist, who claims to know Billy from when he was a child, only that is impossible. And then there is Kate Thistle, ostensibly at Dellacotte to study prison slang, but inordinately interested in both Dott and Billy. As strange events occur and his reality begins to unravel, Billy learns of the Oasis, and a prison ship, and of a desert town called Hospital, where time works in mysterious ways. Dott tells Billy of their terrible entwined histories... whether or not Billy wants to be convinced of what he cannot understand. "I experienced an acute, often surreal, sense of an offender's pathology, with all its traps, humour and contradictions. O My Days is a tour de force of powerful writing. It's demanding, gruelling yet always honest, insightful and finally moving. It explores areas that serious fiction rarely travels to. A quite remarkable novel." Alan Price, author of Outfoxing Hyenas "This is a writer who has been there, viewed with compassion, and reported back. There is a new mythos here, something that feels ancient and sand-blasted and unfathomable, but it is revealed within the most modern of contexts. Highly recommended." Paul Meloy, author of Islington Crocodiles