I have always loved reading books, but I never expected to create one myself.
My first challenge was when my father said to me in 1989 that he would like to produce his memoirs - would I help? Pennant Papers was the result.
The books were beautifully bound by the Otter Bindery, but the
process was expensive, and I wondered whether I could learn book binding myself. It turned out I could! So can you, maybe.
Next we produced a family tree with a hardback book of biographies of every ancestor called Pennant Notes, and gave thirty copies to family members along with a family tree. Then I found I had something important to say about running churches, arising from my work as a curate in the Church of England. After several attempts to create and bind my own books, I finally took the plunge and had 2200 copies of The Priorities of Jesus printed by Page Brothers of Norwich. I still have a few hundred of them left!
Bishop David Pytches kindly said I write well, so I then tried my hand at a novel - The Piano Teacher. You've guessed it - I was teaching piano by this time. In it, Bruce Winter saves the universe from multiplying machines. (They say all first novels are autobiographical...). To my delight, it won an award. Two more novels followed, to complete the story: The Investigator's Folly and The Inventor's Choice.
I
did not expect to write again, but five years later, When That
Time Comes popped up from nowhere.
This time I put it on my website as a download. The theme was and
is relevant - what would happen if all the computers suddenly
stopped working following a solar flare? Most likely at a solar
maximum, which comes every eleven years. The next one will be in
2023.
In 2017 I wrote again, The Garden of the Galaxy. The theme here is about the far future - how ever will a civilisation stretching across the galaxy cope if there really is an upper speed limit, namely the speed of light? The story of George the well-intentioned policeman in crisis is weaved around the way humanity has learned to communicate across inter-stellar distances. Is this a prophetic vision or not?
In 2018 Inearly died from pancreatitis, but made a full recovery, to the amazement of the medics. I wrote an account of my experience called 36 Days in Intensive Care.
More
recently, I have added Earthquake Tremors, which comprises the
twenty-one articles I wrote during lockdown, and Follow Jesus: Do
I Have to Go to Church? Can I Trust the Bible? which tells my
life story in relation to these two questions.
In
2022 I opened my business to others and took on my first client,
Chris Pitts. His book Broken Body is an
impassioned plea on bahalf of the lower lower working class, from
whose ranks he is proud to have come. A sequel called The Caring Game about his grim experiences in hands-on psychiatric
nursing soon followed.
In the summer of 2022 I was staying with my sister and brother-in-law, Marion and Seaton. I discovered that he had a dozen accounts of his travels lying in a drawer, including an eight month journey from the UK to Nairobi with his family, and also a train journey from South Wales to New South Wales. It has been a pleasure to produce these in two volumes.
Chris Pitts told me I had to write a book The Bible:
Word of God? Word of Man? so I did!
Thanks for your interest, and happy reading. More about my own books here. They are on Amazon. I keep prices as low as I can.
David Pennant, Woking
