Stories in the Making
Work-in-progress, raw excerpts, and standalone observations. Fiction, essays, and narrative non-fiction grounded in real place and honest experience.
Favourite Books
Stories shape the way I write. These are the books I return to — the ones that taught me rhythm, honesty, and how to pay attention to the world.
- The Bible – It taught me that love isn’t something outside us, but something living within us all. Its message is less about fear and more about recognising the presence of compassion, dignity, and goodness already inside every person.
- The Ripper and the Royals – Melvin Fairclough – My father’s book was shaped by the extraordinary storytelling of Joseph Sickert. It’s a great story told by a great storyteller, but over time it became clear that it was treated as fact when all the evidence points to it being just that — a story. The Maybrick Diary was a fake, and the Kosminski DNA claims were weak, but my father’s book still stands out because it captured a myth with emotional truth, even if not historical truth.
- 1984- George Orwell – It taught me that power often relies on division. The “Two Minutes Hate” showed how people can be manipulated into fearing or despising an enemy that may not even exist. It’s a warning about how easily emotion can be weaponised when people are kept apart instead of brought together.
- Pharaohs And Kings: A Biblical Quest-David Rohl – Books like Pharaohs and Kings, and George Hagopian’s In Search of Noah’s Ark, showed me that the Bible and history are not myths or stories — they are real events written in stone across five thousand years. I walked among those stones in Turkey and Egypt. I touched the places where ancient people lived and breathed. And I learned that history is not distant. It is human. It is alive. It is us..
- Discoveries at Ephesus – John Turtle Wood – I read this when I was about 10 or 11. It fascinated me, but it also annoyed me. Wood’s excavation was disguised as railway work while really driven by the hunt for treasure, and the destruction bothered me even as a child. It taught me early on that powerful people often hide their real motives behind noble stories, and that history is sometimes damaged in the process.
Why These Books
Each one taught me something different — how to build a world, how to listen to a character, how to write with weight or lightness. They’re part of the DNA of my own work.