The late 1990s in a provincial town in Greater London. Two very different characters, one male, one female, with one thing in common, dissatisfaction with their everyday lives and solace and escape in a private world of fantasies and daydreams. Martin is nerdy, obsessed with sports trivia, struggling to fit in at his workplace, where he is bullied. Jacqui an unmarried mum suffering at the hands of an abusive partner. The novel charts their respective progress through failed attempts at rel...

Miscellaneous Thoughts combines the poems of the 2001 full collection of the same name and the 2002 pamphlet A Different Game by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill. The poems explore themes of reflection, lost love, childhood, marriage breakup, lifestyle, sport, growing up and growing old, with an increasing emphasis on use of language as well as conveying a story or message in words. Many appeared in their original format in the small press magazines of both the UK a...

At college in early 1980s Britain, Mark doesn't really fit in. A growing sense of alienation leads to tension with classmates, teachers and parents as he finds himself drawn to fellow loners who don't conform to society's rules. Along the way he finds love with Carrie and true friendship with Pat, bonded by a mutual love of punk fashion and music. With Pat he launches a band intent on hitting the musical big time.'Young Punks' is about growing up, as two friends discover pubs, gigs...

Jack - approaching sixty and pining for a lost love, Beth, living below an eccentric best friend, and working in a civil service job he hates - daydreams about a past he never had. Intermixed with reality, his daydreams are an obsessive fantasy world but one he writes down in more and more detail as it becomes strangely true but is it everything he expected and hoped it would be? His two worlds slowly merge, in a novel he entitles An Appointment With God that questions the very n...

Sands of Time combines the poems of the 2013 full collection of the same name with the shorter pamphlets Missing Parts (2015) and Twenty Poems (2021), as well as a selection of new poems by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill and are the most recent ones he's written. The poems are in a confessional style and in the vein of the American Beat tradition. They explore themes of reflection, relationships, bereavement and the loss of a father, parenthood, ...

Rat Race is a semi autobiographical novel set in the 1980s, in Thatchers Britain. It focuses on Paul, who has just graduated and wants to be a writer. He faces overwhelming pressure from everyone around him, however, to get on and join the Rat Race, against his will and in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live.

Bristol 1985 - at its heart a thriving indie music scene with its own clubs, shops like Revolver Records and releases by labels like Sarah Records which offer escape for fifteen-year old kids like Will, who holds imaginary conversations with the likes of Dan Treacy of The Television Personalities, Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine - until with his friend John, he seizes the opportunity to form their own band and to carve a path to acceptance, a recor...

Marking the Occasions collects all the author's published short stories and short prose of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in chronological order, and incorporates three collections Marking the Occasions, Funny Farm and The Word. By keeping to date order, it allows the reader to follow the author's stylistic development over time from more experimental early works to short stories in the more classic, traditional style of the genre. The pieces variously explo...

Edward Chapman is a recently retired London financier, living near Oxford. He takes an unplanned holiday to South Wales, after discovering his younger, glamorous wife is having an affair with a work colleague. For Edward it's both a means of escape and an opportunity to spend time in the city of his former university, Swansea, where he met his first wife, Angela. During his stay, as he confronts the ghosts of his past and present, Edward slowly comes to terms with the fact he's been living...

A day in the life of Tom, a bored mid-fifties arts administrator, suddenly energised by the prospect of meeting his ex-fiancée, Fiona, for the first time in over thirty years. The dilemma is that Tom is married but enticed by the wealth of possibilities seeing Fiona might bring. The planned meeting causes him to reflect on the painful manner in which the couple first separated years earlier, and the many years in-between in which Tom had never entirely forgotten or got over Fiona despite t...

Paris in the 1990s. Writer's Block is the story of Henri, a womanising, gambling, hard-drinking, drug-taking, struggling writer, with high literary aspirations. His failure to complete the novel he's working on and make the big time leads him into a spiralling decline of addictions, putting both his relationship to partner, Monique, and his health at risk. It is the story of Henri's bohemian friends, Louis, Jean, Maurice, Michelle, Rosalie and Dominique, a group with artistic ambitions who...

The Wind Changes Direction combines the poems of the 2007 full collection of the same name and the 2009 full collection Celebrations of Life by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill in one poetry book. The poems are in a confessional style and in the vein of the American Beat tradition. They explore themes of reflection, relationships, family and friendships, the passing of time, parenthood, sport, transport, work, the ageing process, routines, the seasons, cont...