Set in the autumn of 1989 in New York City, the story of a disillusioned blue-collar worker and dedicated barfly, Pete Manson, and his disintegrating marriage to his beautiful and more aspirational wife, Kate. Sharing an inadequate apartment together, Manson spends his time cruising bars and parks and avoiding work as best he can. His regular drinking haunt is Frank's Bar, where he hangs out with affable barman, Mike, and fellow barfly and drifter, fading beauty, Mary. On his travels he en...

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...

Aslightly raunchier sequel to 21 Days In Swansea. It picks up the story a few months later, with retired investment banker, Edward Chapman, now running a second-hand bookshop with new partner, Jill, having left his old life and unfaithful estranged wife, Alice, behind in Oxford, with no plans to return. A chance visit to Neath one afternoon persuades him to open a second bookshop and coffee shop there but his Alice turns up unexpectedly, intent on staying 21 days in a bid to win h...

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...

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...

Sick Note & Scrapbook combines the poems of the 1995 short pamphlet Sick Note and the 1998 short pamphlet Scrapbook by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill, when the author was working as a local news reporter in the South West of England. The poems of Sick Note are more personal and have themes of love, loss, longing, heartache and break-up, whilst the themes explored in Scrapbook are more general and centre on social realism. Many appeared i...

Simon is a would-be writer and a serial monogamist, with a habit of self-sabotage. He loves women but has a habit of messing up his relationships with them, despite his best efforts and starting each new relationship with optimism and genuine conviction it will last this time.'Four Women' charts Simon's life with consecutive girlfriends, one after another, over a twenty-year period. Through a mixture of his own inadequacies and hang ups as well as theirs, things go wrong, until he e...

Poems From the Eighties is an introduction to the early work of Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill. All the poems were written in the 1980s when the poet was in his late teens and early twenties and an undergraduate of Swansea University, before training and later working as a local news reporter in Devon. The poems are taken from the full collections Earth Rites, 1984, New England in the Fall and Chasing the Dragon, both from 1985, and If You Co...

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...

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...

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...

Welcome Lonely Hearts is the fifth full collection of poetry by Exeter poet and novelist Andy Botterill, first published in 1994. It was five years in the making, collecting poems written from 1989 to 1994, when the author was working as a local news reporter in the South West of England, and the poet's first collection since his 1989 short pamphlet Coming to Terms. The poems are in a confessional style and have themes of love, loss, longing, break-up, contemporary history and social comme...