Flashback Forward
Published on 1. October 2012
368 pages
978-1-77553-179-1 (ISBN)
Description
An intriguing novel about the choices we make, about finding out who we really are and about living life to the fullest.
Tam Cochrane is a sickly lad, confined to his bed in Glasgow in the 1880s. His only experience of adventure and the outside world is through books - that is until his father decides to sell up and head for New Zealand. As they take the four-month journey by ship, Tam's health begins to improve, and with it signs of a new Tam, fully engaging in the real world.
After arriving in their new country, the family heads to Rotorua and Tarawera, only to be caught in the volcanic eruption of 1886. Having been concussed, Tam wakes up, groggy but still the fit young man he'd been growing into, except he finds he is in Napier, emerging from the ruins of the 1931 earthquake. What has happened to the last 45 years? Why is he still a young man? And who is the other Tam Cochrane, now living like a recluse back in Glasgow?
An intriguing story, it is set among the cataclysmic events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Person
John Cairney has been a professional actor, writer, singer, director, producer, lecturer and painter. All of these aspects go into the making of the author of this novel. His first writing was autobiographical. This led him to biographies based on characters he'd played in the theatre, such as Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His next publications centred on his real passion, which is football. This is his second foray into fiction. John has spent much of his life travelling, living for some time in New Zealand, but now having returned to his native Glasgow.
