Nigel Patten's Blog

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What inspires a writer to imagine a novel? It might be a person or a place or in my case a quotation that caught my eye, combined with memories of places that have stayed with me over the years.

In THE HOUNDS OF SAMARIA I began with a quotation “Most people have the ability to describe and experience events and places that are blocked from ordinary perception.” To develop this idea I chose to situate the story in the south-west of Crete, a stretch of coast I got to love during several “hippie”...

I was born at the beginning of WW2 at Teddington (Tide-Ending-Town) on the River Thames in what would now be called Greater London. My memories are mostly of fooling around on the river on home-made rafts (I couldn’t swim but we never capsized) or excavating intricate labyrinths of underground tunnels with other local boys. These tunnels were periodically demolished by our parents, who considered them dangerous. There was also an equally dangerous gravel pit somewhere that occupied much of ou...