The Learning Curves - Couverture souple

Grainger, Alan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1419615793 ISBN 13 : 9781419615795

Editeur : Createspace Independent Pub, 2005

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Sixteen year old Jimmy O Callaghan, unable to accept the changes in his life that follow his mother s death and his father s betrayal of her memory, runs away with only a few pounds taken from the cash register in the bar of The Dancer Hogan - his home, since birth, in a small town in rural Ireland. Never daunted by the immensity of the break that he has made he crosses the Irish Sea and makes for London. Luck attends him all the way as he meets up with a series of people who, in recognising his attractiveness, provide him with work and education in some unusual ways, all of which stand him in good stead for the journey upon which he has embarked. His first opportunity comes in a hotel where, to his disbelief and embarrassment, he is seduced by the owner s wife. Encounters with others follow before he decides to move on to his next job, on a building site, where new experiences and new skills add to his knowledge. Following an accident he moves on again, this time to London where he teams up with Peachy, a boy, of his own age, who has also been driven from his home. This friendship which is destined to last all their lives now assumes great importance and together they take up employment in The Royal Oak , an inn in Kent, where Jimmy s entrepreneurial talents begin to emerge and flourish, culminating in his forming his first little company. From then on there is no stopping him as he perambulates around the world increasing his knowledge and his wealth. America, France and Australia all feature prominently in his progress as do a number of women who break his heart. After a twenty year journey of love and learning, encompassing murder, armed robbery, business risk taking and romance, he returns to Ireland to visit the one person from home with whom he has always remained in touch and together they address some of the painful issues that, all those years before, drove him to climb out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night and tiptoe down the town s darkened streets.

Biographie de l'auteur

Alan Grainger is an Englishman who emigrated to Ireland at the time when everyone else seemed to be going the other way. He got seduced by the lifestyle, married an Irish woman and never went back. They have three children and seven grandchildren. Since retiring, other than when he s watching rugby or cricket, he has been travelling, painting and writing. His travels have taken him all over the world, provided him with much of the background material that features in his books, and allowed him to choose authentic sets against which he can tell his stories. They should also have inspired him to paint great landscapes but, for reasons not obvious to him, his paintings almost always turn out of be pictures of stones! He started writing after a trip to the head waters of the Amazon, during which he and his wife lived for a week in a hut in a remote part of the rain forest. You should write a book about it. his friends said when he came back, so he did. It s entitled The Tree that Walked . This was followed by: The Klondike Chest, a spoof biographical story of the author s grandfather s part in the last Great Gold Rush; It s Only Me, the author s own autobiography and The Rumstick Book of children s fairy stories and comic poems. After these came a trilogy of three novels: the first, The Learning Curves, is a rags to riches story; the second, Father Unknown, concerns the hunt by an adoptee for his natural parents; and the third, The Legacy, follows the search made by a brother and sister for a valuable unclaimed estate to which they have been told they may have rights. Some characters and a country town in Tipperary link the books. His latest novel, Blood On The Stones, is story of two boys who, having been brought up as brothers fall out over a woman, carve out a life in Secret Intelligence Services and eventually come together again to foil a plot to ignite a new Middle Eastern war.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Createspace Independent Pub
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1419615793
• ISBN 13: 9781419615795
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 444
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible