Mombasa Madrigal

Mombasa Madrigal (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

Mombasa Madrigal...
...and other African escapades

"A collection of stories introduced by a novelette that is a fusion of memoir, travelogue and speculation. 'Mombasa Madrigal' charts a modern voyage to that city of crumbling equatorial grandeur. A thoughtful, pulsating, intuitive text, it is something new in the somewhat conventionalised universe of contemporary narratives.

The short stories that follow complement and amplify the impact. Outrigger canoes with crab claw sails ride the currents of the Indian Ocean into oblivion, the mountains of Kenya loom high over grounded ships miles from the sea, pirates dream impossibilities and scheme them into reality along the Swahili Coast. And always Mombasa, the gateway to East Africa, pulsing endlessly in the heat of the night."

Contents:

Mombasa Madrigal * In African Airspace * Nothing Will Happen * Noah the Second *Sailing to Port Manitou

Note: The story 'Noah the Second' is only available in the paperback edition, not in the ultra-limited handcrafted original edition.

The Nostalgia that Never Was

The Nostalgia that Never Was (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

"Marco Polo is travelling again in the service of Kublai Khan but this time he wanders off the path and ends up in an unknown part of the world. In his solitude he becomes an emperor of dreams. The ghosts of prehistory visit him, and the phantoms of later ages and the future too. He even finds himself in the unexpected position of haunting himself. Only his very last spectral guest can know everything that is essential, and that last guest may well be you, the reader."

A tribute to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities but with ghosts instead of cities. 222 ghosts pay a visit to Marco Polo, who is now enthroned in a natural amphitheatre. Having travelled in the service of the Khan he is now a Khan himself, the Khan of the Canyons, and others can come to him for a change. And they do. From Pangu, Adam and Keyumars, three of the first men from three different traditions, to the very last man of all. The centuries slide past, some ghosts are substantial, others are flimsy, a few are nothing more than an idea or the starting point for a tangential routine.