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The books are listed here in order of publishing date, with the oldest at the top.

For the latest novel, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Links to the Amazon pages where the books can be purchased can be found on their respective dedicated pages.

The Novels.

Click on the cover to go to The View From Kleoboulos" page.

The View From Kleoboulos

John Manuel's first work of fiction. 

Dean and Alyson are two young

people who come together in a bar

one evening in their home city

of Bath, UK. Alyson's mother once

worked with Brian, a musician who

never quite "made it", but ends up

playing guitar and singing in a

Lindian Bar.
   Quite how Brian and Christine

(Alyson's mother) come to have

a devastating effect on their daughter's

relationship with the man of her dreams will have you gripped, both with emotion and with intrigue.
   A real page-turner, the perfect holiday read, "The View From Kleoboulos" is Thomas Hardy for the 21st century.
   Sometimes the past comes back to haunt you, but occasionally it comes back and bites.

Eve of Deconstruction

Chippenham UK, present day. 

Eve Watkins is a fairly average

modern woman in her early forties

with two teenage kids, a loving

husband with a steady job and career

of her own. It looks like her average

life is fairly uneventful, yet secure.
   Following the death of her mother

she discovers things about her own

past that come as a complete surprise

to Eve. These lead her eventually

out to a small village in mainland Greece, where developments soon lead to her life beginning to deconstruct before her.
   Ought she to have let sleeping dogs lie? Yet she knows she has to find out. She has to know who she really is.
   Whatever the cost.

Click on the cover to go the the "Eve of Deconstruction" page.

Two in the Bush

Adrian Dando moved out to

Rhodes to start a new life.

Assuming his life was on track in

the UK, he was devastated when

his wife had left him a couple of

years earlier and he just wanted

to be somewhere else, somewhere

where he could hopefully rebuild

his dreams. A chance discovery

of the body of a woman in the

bushes not far from his home soon

changes his dream into yet another nightmare.
   Be careful what you wish for.

Click on the cover to go to the "Two in the Bush" page.

The Crete Connection

In rural Wiltshire, England,

a six month-old baby disappears

from a stroller while its mother

is inside a store for just

two minutes.

 

A young Englishman begins

a summer of adventure

on the Greek island of Crete.

 

By pure chance, the two events,

although separated by over twenty years, are irrevocably linked by the taverna where the young Englishman ends up helping out.

 

The result is life-changing, both for the mother of the child that disappeared, and for the young Englishman. A chance visit to the same taverna by these two separate individuals brings on a crisis in both of their lives, but will it end well for either?

Click on the cover to go to "The Crete Connection"" page.

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The Lone Refugee

When a young British man

living with his Greek wife

on the Greek Island of Lesbos

discover a half-drowned Syrian

refugee on a remote beach near

their home, their desire to help

the unfortunate man soon begins

to have far reaching effects on

their own lives and that of their

families that neither could have foreseen.

Click on the cover

to go to the "Lone Refugee" page.

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A Brief Moment of Sunshine

The prequel to "The View From

Kleoboulos." Claire Mason's

life seems to be on track. She is a

successful artist and she has a good

marriage.

   Then, almost overnight, a

succession of events turns her entire

life upside down. How will she deal

with it?

   Will she emerge from the

maelstrom that threatens to destroy

her mind, or will she implode

emotionally and mentally? How do visits to Greece play a part in her navigating her way through the tangle of events that threaten to destroy her sanity?

   As with "The View From Kleoboulos" there are twists aplenty here. In Claire Mason's life, will she ever glimpse a brief moment of sunshine?

Click on the cover to go to the "A Brief Moment of Sunshine" page.

A "Prequel"? Well, since it's a corruption of the word "sequel" it's a story that ought to be read second, but contains action from either before or earlier on in the previous [existing] book. Thus "A Brief Moment of Sunshine" should be read AFTER "The View From Kleoboulos".

Sometimes You Just Can't Tell

When Lewis and his Greek wife

Katerini return to the island

of her birth for a visit, neither

could have predicted the series

of events that would unfold,

resulting in both of them coming

to wonder if they’ll ever see

each other again.
   Katerini, though, wonders if

she’ll even live to see anyone at all.
   From the author of “The View

From Kleoboulos”, “A Brief Moment

of Sunshine” and “Eve of Deconstruction” comes a dark tale of the results arising from misdeeds done many years in the past - with potentially tragic consequences.

Click on the cover to go the the "Sometimes You Just Can't Tell" page.

Panayiota

An old woman lies dying in

a hospice in the UK. She has an

incurable cancer and is in the

early stages of dementia. Yet, in

her lucid moments, she wants

to tell her life story to the only

person who will listen, before

it's too late, and her secrets are

lost forever. That person is her

nephew, a retired accountant

who has the time to sit beside

her and keep her company during her long, lonely, final days.
   Panayiota was a teenager when the Germans walked into Athens in 1941. How she ended up in a hospice in the UK is the subject of an extraordinary tale, during the telling of which her nephew will learn things that will shake what he believes about his family and himself to the very core.

Click on the cover to go to the "Panayiota" page.

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No Sign

When she allows her estranged

birth-father back into her life,

22 year-old Amanda thinks it

could only lead to better

prospects, and maybe a slightly

better bank balance.

 

Yet she is unprepared for just

what an effect he was going to

have on her life and that of her

friends and family.

This story shows how the

perpetrators of crimes can often become such simply by allowing themselves to take one step too many down a dangerous path. As the story unfolds, the consequences eventually lead both the perpetrator and the victim to the point of wondering just which of them has the most power, which of them is the dominant participant in the perilous game into which they both become immersed.

 

Amanda wonders if she'll ever see a way out of her nightmare, and her father Philip Trent if he'll have any chance at all of escaping a very long prison sentence.

 

That's always assuming, of course, that the situation doesn't remain unresolved, in which case the stakes are impossibly high, and the future extremely uncertain, for Amanda.

Click on the cover to go to "No Sign"" page.

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Outage

If all the electricity in the world were to suddenly stop working, how soon would society degenerate into anarchy? What would happen to the world's 400 nuclear power plants, for example? How dependent has humanity become on electricity in order for society to function? These and many other issues are addressed in this dark, apocalyptic vision of a world electricity is no more.

Click on the cover

to go to the "Outage" page.

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