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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
