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.

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...

Years Spinning By Out Of Control combines the poems of the 1998 collection of the same name and the 2000 pamphlet Water Under the Bridge by Exeter poet and novelistAndy Botterill. The poems explore themes of love, loss, longing, heartache and break-up, sex, substance abuse and social realism. Many appeared in their original format in the small presses of both the UK and America at the time of writing, and all the poems have been updated with revisions and additions for th...

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...

The Rat Race is the 1980s creation of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Paul, who has just graduated and wants to be a writer, faces overwhelming pressure to 'get on' and join the Rat Race, in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live. Pretty soon he finds himself on the scrapheap and having to compromise his beliefs in order to make something of himself. Rat Race is one year in his life, charting his fluctuating fortunes, set against the backdrop of the music and fashion of ...

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...

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...