This week we review a book of short stories by British author Simon Van Der Velde. Shorts are something he excels at. His plethora of awards include The Yeovil Literary Prize, which he’s won twice, and The National Association of Writers’ Groups Open Competition. In the past week he’s also published his very first novel, The Silent Brother… I woke up during the early hours of Saturday morning, struggled to get back to sleep and opened this one for a quick look. I’d finished it by Sunday afternoon. It was so good I really couldn’t bear to put it down. Anyway, we’ll cover that one in a future post.
This post is all about Backstories, a collection of 14 shorts, highlighting mystery figures from the real worlds of fame and infamy. As Simon points out, all you get in the tabloids is ideas of good and evil, success and failure. So he dug deeper to discover the pain, the passions and the imperfections behind some very famous names, and came up with Backstories, an unusual, interesting and entertaining read as you try to guess whose head you're visiting. Great fun... a kind of 'whodunnit, only it's more a who-is-going-to-do-it, as none of these people were famous. YET.
Good books deserve readers and reviews are a great way of achieving that.
Read, review, repeat.
All previous episodes of Fully Booked & Bonkers are available here.