Books published by AESOP Publications

Behaving Well consists of three stories on a related theme: When people are forced to leave their home, in the new place they're often told to 'behave themselves' or be sent back, to to somewhere else. In jail or equivalent, they - everyone - may be let go early for 'good behaviour'. Behaving well is a condition for staying somewhere - even somewhere you don't want to be - and 'going back' may pose dilemmas even more problematic than behaving badly. You find yourself in a chain of ill-fortunes and tragedies - a nakba, a catastrophe as one aspect of it has been called. What other rules exist, except our efforts at 'behaving well'? But, you change, through life; you watch injustices you say you cannot remedy. And your behaviour changes, together with its driving principles. If you want history - you can't have good behaviour. Good Behaviour: Alex, undocumented immigrant, is inspired, shadowed, by the adventures of Alexander, the Great. No one says Alexander behaved well - but he acted! He transformed. He shaped the classical world, scattered Greeks all over, changed cultures, till his suicidal addictions finished him. Alex starts precarious: is jailed, meets a real hero, Valerio - joins the ex-prisoners and outcasts in a barren place. There, they improvise a polity - growing natural drugs, organising an army. Valerio is their inspiration, their guide. Alex teams up with Anicette, whose inspiration is the book 'On Lying'. He spins out of control but his behaviour is consistent. People close to Alex behave in different ways, but all maintain their principles, Anicette as well. Anicette joins with a young ambitious woman, Mélisande. After the death of Alex, we see all who are left have indeed behaved well - at least, consistently. Alex, though, has acted, and imagined: the others, they only react. Anicette concludes, instructing Mélisande - the only judge of our behaviour is ourself. Misconduct: Does behaving well count for something? It doesn't seem to matter for success and failure, revelation or obscurity. In Misconduct, Matti, a political exile with aspirations of humanistic value, tries to make a life - maintaining principles, but surviving - the betrayal of his partner, unofficial enslavement. He wanders, has adventures - becomes a military strategist, travels to the stepps with a lady jockey - but his life is seeing others ride away, betray, or suffer punishments, promotions - which he's been unabvle to prevent or even understand. Ultimately, his organisation gives him the mission - to assassinate the Chief. To do so means his organisation will be expunged - a mass non-violent movement, non-violent, exposed. But for the otther opposition, assassination means a civil war that they are bound to lose. Matti would betray his principles, his own morality - and probably involve all oppositions in disaster. But - loyalty, behaving well or badly - he has no choice. Many real circumstances involve the exiled militants in just this - perfidious - choice.Catastrophe: The catastrophe is that everything happens comes to an end - without a scrap of meaning, still less justice, truth, equity. Some people behave very poorly: Yannick who has 'saved' Hana and enslaved her, Pavel .... for others, the behaviour is just on the edge of awful - Typhaine .... Dr Hoffman sees and can do nothing except register. Hana has character, but no context where the character can assert itself or, indeed, be good or bad.

Three novellas on friendship: Cities on the Plain, on a Hill is the story of Ahmed and Nico, ex-pats and best friends. The protagonist of Fame is engaged to follow the past life of an ancient, who hopes to achieve a kind of immortality. In Cleansing there are mysteries, situations not resolved, friends who lead astray and who you lead astray.

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’.  We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before.  It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his  new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours.  He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing - in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer - exhibition standard. That’s a gift! 

John Fraser's latest work of fiction People You Will Never Meet consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and butterflies. The Palestinians move on - one to a ruined Syria, the other to frustration in Europe. The second tale involves a bright country girl, seduced by her teacher with aspirations to a powerful career. She seeks speed, which does not end well for her. In the final tale, the hero aims higher still - a project for the human species. This involves journeying through Eastern Europe, and its underground. Its climax is the burning of a stranger's house, and a long long wait for a slow train...

IMPORTANT NOTE: PLEASE IGNORE THE ;S 1-2 MONTH DELIVERY DELAY WARNING: ON AMAZON.CO.UK - IF YOU BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON IT SHOULD BE DELIVERED WITHIN A WEEK.Overnight Taylor Amber's life is transformed when his parents die under mysterious circumstances and he becomes an orphanin the Diggory Home for Children in Distress. Taylor eventually befriends another Diggory long-termer, a spiky misfit of a girl called Georgie Yates.But soon afterwards Taylor discovers an incredible secret: his physicist parents had not been working at the local university as he had always assumed. They were in fact head scientists for a secret organisation called TARGET (Time Agency Response Group: Earthly Threats),and on the day of their deaths they were about to embark on the maiden flight in BULLSEYE, the world's first time machine.With BULLSEYE at his disposal, Taylor quickly realises that he has the power to rescue his parents from their fate and bring them back from the dead. But unknown to Taylor and Georgie, there is a deadly menace that is about to threaten the entire world ...taylor amber: time agent is a riveting, suspenseful time travel adventure; a bittersweet tale of a teenage boy-girl relationship;a metaphysical thriller on the implications of messing with the fabric of spacetime, and a genuinely moving story of two young people's shared experience of loss. It is also at times, very funny, with a huge cast of richly imaginative characters from both ends of the time spectrum, from the deep past to a terrifying future ...The novel crawls with suspicious agents, police, boffins - few of them being what they claim to be, and several sets of enemies.In the scary worlds of Earth and Deep Space, the only person Taylor can trust is Georgie.

Rhyming picture book about a little girl with the biggest smile. Watch her smile spread and you might even catch it before you go to bed. A bedtime story with a lovely message.

Human life is made up of a series of journeys, and every stage is an experienceand purpose in the long history of life's challenges. But there are two journeysevery person must undertake, a physical and a spiritual one; and whilstthe physical one is essential there is also need for a spiritual one.The Torah as a guide enables us to attain both ends. To be a Jew is to be on a journey and as a people we have never stood still.Judaism teaches that life is one long journey through time, and each movementand stoppage serves a higher purpose and better future. In his role as rabbi and educator, Rabbi Simon S. Silas places great emphasis onJewish learning and Torah values and in this edited version of 'Sermons and Articles'delivered over the years to Sephardi congregations in North West London,Rabbi Silas has quoted a treasury of statements from the Bible, Talmud, Midrash andRabbinic literature in the belief that their ethical and spiritual themes offer wisecounsel in our role as being the eternal people of God. As he comments: 'Life's Journeys has been a labour of love. I hope that this work, filled with the wisdomof Scripture and Rabbinic commentaries, will inspire readers to a deeper understandingof our faith in God and direct them to face the challenges in "life's journeys".'

Retired investigator Richard Palmer lives in the Charterhouse, a charity case engaged in regular altercations with the Preacher who is trying to make him conform. Nearly everyone has died, among them Chief Minister Cecil his old client and William Shakespeare his bête noir, the one who got away.A letter from his goddaughter Miracle in Oxford brings him up short. Her foster parents have died, she is in trouble; and she is in love with an impecunious student who harbours a dream to go to London, the Court and make his name as a writer. Worse, William Davenant fancies himself to be Shakespeare's heir in body as well as soul.Palmer brings Miracle back to London to lodge with his old flame Emilia Lanier. The story charts Miracle's fate and the rise of the charming and unreliable Davenant in the houses of the nobility and the world of court musicians and actors including the brilliant Nicholas Lanier and a crusty old survivor in the Kings' Men, John Hemmings. Meantime the Caroline age succeeds the Jacobean leading on to Civil War.

The work of Dr John Auping seeks to assist readers to differentiate observationally verified aspects of cosmology from ideas whose verification is distant, or perhaps impossible. Such a task is performed by using a careful application of the orthodox scientific method. This English edition is a part of Auping's original work especially devoted to the description of the dynamics of stars, and the analysis of the Big Bang, steady state and multiverse models from a critical point of view. The author approaches different aspects of the evolution of the Universe using different branches of astrophysics, Newtonian mechanics, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, quantum physics and general relativity, with a clear and concise narrative. Mathematical boxes support the deeper study of mathematical-physical relations, which can be omitted by readers who are not specialised. The mix of science, science fiction and metaphysics in modern cosmology is analysed with strict hard core scientific arguments. The history of cosmology reveals ideas, many times antagonistic, both at the level of the interpretation of astrophysical observations, and at the level of the speculations about the origin of the Universe and the fine-tuning of its physical constants, that made it possible that we are here to discuss it. The search for the truth about the origin of the Universe necessarily touches on philosophical issues. Firstly, starting from Popper's philosophy of science, the author clarifies where exactly the frontier lies between science, science fiction and metaphysics. It then appears that in the final analysis of the scientific fact of fine-tuning present in the Big Bang, we are left with only two rational options to explain it: a multiverse, which the author shows to be science fiction, sometimes with a-theological intentions; or an intelligent cause, which is part of the discourse in the frontier of physics and metaphysics, with obvious theological implications. The dialogue between faith and science is expressed clearly and objectively in this work, where the observable and the logically demonstrable, set the pattern of what is true.

What is victory? What would victory actually be in our present world? What would revolution be - and what would happen after?In John Fraser's latest novel, Mack meets an old combatant, a revolutionary, his revolution accomplished: satisfied. He leaves his girlfriend Sophie, but never shakes her off. He tries revealed religion, mysticism, sex. Through his showy friend, Paco, he meets Aurora - a flaky performer, a woman every man would die for her. He tries to define what's on the inside from the outside - specifically, a poor, resource-rich country, between revolt and foreign intervention.He joins a committee deciding between a project for reform: justice: complicity ... or colluding with a persecuted opposition. Complexity gradually comes to prevail... He takes refuge in isolation, a leisure centre-cum retreat, where political plotting carries on, a kind of Mongol wave may be in preparation. He recoils: neither reform nor revolutionary onslaught - both certainty, predictability, that is, and destruction - are to his taste.As his latest girl is seduced by his new best friend, he returns to the beginning: for tomorrow is the victory…

Where are we? Where are we going? What's in store?John Fraser's The Answer considers these questions in four stories:In 'The Colours of Air': many characters live in an apartment, a microcosm - intellectuals from Sartre to de Beauvoir, security experts, émigrés and refugees, traditionals from the country, all involved in strategies of survival. In the end, the question becomes to survive, what must be jettisoned, what has irrevocably been lost?In 'Peace and War' - chronicles couples, joining up and spinning off, East Europeans on the margin of a West where music and drink are the context - hiding and burying the dead is a main task - Pavel, the protagonist seems to find permanence in stonework, sculpture, but all wait expectantly for the sound of horses, horsemen and their messages. These characters are on the margin - there seems to be no core, though they are seeking it.In 'Interlude': two displaced intellectuals are being vetted for their status, their security. The theme is 'space without freedom' - waiting, with expectancy, but without knowing what comes next.The answer finally comes in 'The Answer'. It's daring, a risk, a leap into the unknown, with probable disastrous results.

The most recent work of fiction by John Fraser, hailed as 'the most original novelist of our time' by the distinguished poet and Whitbread Award winner John Fuller, Sisters is a contemporary reworking of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.The protagonist, Masha, a young woman with a rich MiddleEastern culture, is forced by war to leave her country, her sisters, and even change her name. Abandoning her training as a surgeon, she is involved in an innovative scientific venture - superconductors. Intrigued by the philosophical aspects of her work - energy, time and distance - she seeks new 'sisters' and tries to assert herself in the unfamiliar cultures and human projects she encounters. After many adventures she finds two sisters in an idyllic tree house, but provokes the accidental death of one of them. She follows the other sister to a utopian commune in Brazil - but the group is in effervescence and conflict. The two take refuge on an island, involved in illicit chemistry this time - but there are conflicts with the native inhabitants. She meets up with a predatory dealer in cultural artefacts, and this ends badly. Her relation with a musician who pushes her to political celebrity also ends badly. She tries reconciliation with her 'sister', who has chosen a 'primitive' lifestyle, 'back to the forest....' In the end she's taken up by Irene, who is occupied in a big house with a laboratory equipped for research in space travel. She finds affection, but in an echo of the Chekhovian theme which runs through the plot, the train which promises escape in the Cherry Orchard finds an ironic resonance in the expedient of space travel and re-location.

The Magnificent Wurlitzer is an epic work of literary fiction, divided into four parts. Its theme is that of the 'guilty Faust' on a fantastic, grotesque journey seeking his truth, his Mephistopheles. Its hero treads in the footsteps of epics from East and West, Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, Götterdämmerung.

The Book is small and lethal, and everyone is fighting to possess it. It is worth a great deal of money and may have been written by the Marquis de Sade. Yet this mysterious, erotic book is intimately connected to a series of deaths and suicides of young women before it left France. The Book - The Memoirs of a Novice - has its roots in events that go back to the French Revolution, and has now become crucial to the present-day ambitions of a beautiful, young politician. Olympe de Chavagnac, a potential President of the French Republic when the present incumbent, Alphonse Lambaud, gives up his fourth term. Olympe is a monarchist who believes she is descended from the last Bourbons, executed during the French Revolution. So passionate is Olympe's belief in her re-incarnation, that she will stop at nothing to own the Book and with its authority become elected President, then restore the Bourbon Monarchy to France. And when she meets Guillaume Lemaitre, who becomes her sponsor and frustrated lover, Olympe forms an alliance with a modern de Sade - with terrifying consequences for the world. Inspired by author Garry O'Connor's discovery of an anonymous manuscript - Les Mémoires de Saturnin - in the garage loft after his family moved into their fifteenth century courthouse on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire borders in 1995, The Book that Kills is de Sade in a modern context, a powerful, erotic psychological thriller, a murder mystery and a historical intrigue. About the authorGarry O'Connor is a playwright, biographer and novelist. His many publications include acclaimed biographies of notable actors, a highly praised biography of the late Pope John Paul II as well as plays, most recently Debussy Was My Grandfather. His latest publications include Subdued Fires, a biography of Pope Benedict XVI and As Luck Would Have It, the memoir of the distinguished actor Sir Derek Jacobi, which he has co-authored with Jacobi.

8 February 1601. The personal troops of a disgraced royal favourite mount up and ride on the City of London. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex and his lieutenant, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton are in open revolt against Queen Elizabeth I and her Government. Richard Palmer is swept up in the action. He calls himself an investigator, others call him an informer. Chief Minister Cecil has need for one - the Queen is enraged by the revival of a play at the Globe about deposing a reigning monarch in favour of a populist rival. Was Richard II meant to get the mob in the mood for regicide? She thinks so.A handful of sonnets found in Southampton's lodgings show a potentially incriminating special bond between him and the play's author, William Shakespeare. Palmer sets off on an expanding trail of sonnets from London to Stratford, and a mystery pursuer is on his tail...Chris Crowcroft travelled the world as an army brat. A degree in Law at Oxford University and teaching English in Verona preceded a London career in the arts and in politics. In 2009 he helped save the roof falling in on the head of Shakespeare where he lies buried in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Before and After the Darkness is the third collection of poems by Susan Noble, following The Dream of Stairs: A Poem Cycle and Inside the Stretch of My Heart. To mark the fortieth anniversary of Susan's death, this volume is being published in hardback, paperback and Kindle, making all her poems publicly available for the first time. The Dream of Stairs was privately printed as a posthumous memorial volume in 1975, a year after Susan's untimely death in 1974 at the age of 31. Having announced with typically light-hearted self-depreciation that 'The muse has struck me!', Susan wrote the poems in batches of half a dozen or more from 1965 onwards in what she described as manic bursts of creativity. But these poems are anything but light-hearted, and even a first reading will reveal clearly that levity is not on the menu in a universe 'Where there are no jokes / And people do not pretend.' Susan's output in the last ten years of her life was prolific, but when it came to compiling the poems, after a good deal of deliberation, a clear thematic structure and underlying development seemed to dictate the final order of that original poignant collection. Many of the poems in Before and After the Darkness were triggered by the quotidian experience of living and working in central London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet beneath the fragile surface of her acute observations of domestic and office life in the city, intensely spiritual insights are being played out, sometimes delicately, sometimes shockingly, but always movingly. The poems in this volume were written in the early 1970s, like those in Inside the Stretch of My Heart, and include a number of poems written in 1973 and 1974 in the months before Susan's death. Two further companion volumes are also being published: A Flock of Blackbirds (selected novellas and short stories); and her novel, Drifting Between Empty Tramlines. Profits from the sales of all six volumes are being donated to three charities: Mind, the Samaritans and Sane. Facsimiles of the original typescripts and manuscripts are available online at www.aesopbooks.com/susannoble About the author Brought up in South London, Susan Noble was the second of three children. Her childhood was enriched by being part of our large and closely-knit Jewish family. Unfortunately stricken by polio (then known as infantile paralysis) in her early years, Susan went through life with a degree of physical handicap which she was to overcome with courage and determination. Educated at Croydon High School, Susan studied English at Somerville College, Oxford. After graduating, Susan worked in London, first at the Royal National Institute for the Blind, dictating books for transcription into Braille, and later at the National Central Library in London, where she qualified as a Chartered Librarian. Susan's exceptional sensitivity was reflected in the prolific outpouring of poems to be found in The Dream of Stairs, Inside the Stretch of My Heart and Before and After the Darkness. In these intense, haunting poems, she chronicles her personal response to the world around her, while vividly portraying the inner landscape of her mental and emotional struggle.