A BOOK IN TIME by Mark Stibbe

 

Excerpt 1 A Book In Time

I was conceived in a hot bath in Deal and born, twelve months later, on a mahogany table in Holt. My mother was called Emily Swanson. She was eighty-seven years old when she finally delivered me. She was so overcome that from that day forth she often held me to her chest as she shuffled about the cottage. When she looked at me it was impossible not to notice the adoration in her eyes. Sometimes she would bow, her skin wrinkled like the pages of an antique book. Then she would kiss me.

Once, when a howling wind was buffeting the windows of the cottage, and the flames were trembling in the guttering candles, she held me so close I thought I was going to disappear into her heart. When at last she separated me from her heaving chest she stared and stared at me, her head shaking from side to side and her eyes filled with a melancholy beyond the reach of words. Then a tear formed in her left eye, filling the lens until it spilled from her cheek and fell upon my front.

I thought my spine would break.

My mother lived for just six months after she had brought me into the world. In that time visitors came to pay homage. Young lovers and old lovers and enough blue-stockinged women to fill a library. They journeyed through any weather. When they stood within our panelled parlour room, they strove to outdo one another with their praise.

“You are an emancipator,” one said.

“The bravest of women,” another added.

“A connoisseur of love,” a third exclaimed.

Author bio

Dr Mark Stibbe is the winner of the first ever Page Turner Award for Fiction Writing (2020). He has been described recently by the New York Times as “an acclaimed writer.”

Mark has been writing books since he was 16 and has clocked up over 50 titles since then. Mark's PhD on storytelling was completed in 1982 and published by Cambridge University press.

Mark was a Vicar for 25 years so most of his works have been religious nonfiction released through traditional publishing houses. He was awarded 'Christianity’s' book of the year in 2010.

Mark has ghost written over thirty books for clients of his company BookLab. Through this company, Mark and his team have helped hundreds of new authors to get published.

Lately, Mark has mostly migrated from nonfiction to fiction and has been writing novels in the magical realism genre. His novel 'A Book in Time' was picked as the overall winner out of hundreds of entries in the prestigious and popular Page Turner Awards.

Mark's twin sister Claire is also a full-time novelist. In 2021, she won the Page Turner Award one year after Mark won the same prize. This makes Mark and Claire a unique phenomenon in the publishing world - twins who have won the same literary award in consecutive years!

As adopted children, they had a huge advantage; their adoptive father was a star pupil and friend of CS Lewis. He was also at Merton, Oxford where J.R.R. Tolkien was professor of English.

Mark is now a full-time writer who lives in Kent with his wife Cherith and their Black Labrador Bella. In recent years, he has been a judge for literary awards and is a popular speaker.

Link to Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/mtjxy795

Website: https://bookluver.com/author/mark-stibbe