Living with the Truth
Picture, for a moment, Jonathan Payne, probably the last person in the world
you would expect to be the lead character in anybody's novel, a faded old
bookseller nearing the end of a wasted life. We meet him alone in his flat
in a seaside town in the north of England just waiting on Death to knock at
his front door.
But life has something else in store for poor Jonathan. Instead of Death he gets
to spend an infuriating two days with the personification of truth who opens
Jonathan's eyes to not only what his life has become but what it might have been.
He discovers what he's missed out on, what other people are really thinking and
the true nature of the universe which, as you might imagine, is nothing like he
would have ever expected it to be.
By the end of the book, having learned far more about himself than he ever wanted
to know, Jonathan finds out that it's usually never too late to start again. Only
sometimes it is.
You can read an extract from the book here.
Click on any of the hyperlinks to read reviews of the book by Steve Kane,
Gabriel Orgrease,
Cheryl Anne Gardner,
Denis Taillefer, BCF Book Reviews and
Kay Sexton.
A bit about the writing of Living with the Truth
So, what drives someone to sit down and write a novel? I should be able
to answer that one. And I've tried. I wasn't looking for fame and fortune.
I simply had this idea and it wasn't a poem. But I didn't think it was a
novel.
Objectively speaking, the subject matter was nothing new. I'd been writing
poems about the nature of truth since I was thirteen. I was brought up to
regard the existence of truth as a fundamental concept, something you could
anchor the rest of your life to, but, as I grew older and began to be able
to see behind the surface of things, I began to realise that truth was an
ideal, it didn't work in the real world and it's biggest obstacle was people's
inability to communicate even when they wanted to tell the truth; words get
in the way of the truth.
I wrote the first draft of the story in my father's house on an old
Atari ST
computer; it took only a few weeks to complete and then I showed it to a few
people at work. To my great surprise they liked it but they wanted more.
Originally all the action took place on one day but a second day fleshed out
things and a story was turning into a novel.
I pottered with it for five years before I realised it was finished and I found
I'd written a novel.
Living with the Truth
Read extract
Stranger than Fiction