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M.J. Webb

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Nick Sweeney

Goodreads Author

Born

in London, The United Kingdom

March 31

Website

http://www.nicksweeneywriting.com

Twitter

nikone3na

Genre

Fiction, Memoir, Travel

Member Since

October 2011

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/nicksweeney

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I'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published lots of short stories, many of them finding a home in print and all over the web.

I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.

2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.

My novelette The Émigré Engineer was publi I'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published lots of short stories, many of them finding a home in print and all over the web.

I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.

2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.

My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.

My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.

In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.

My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.

I post links to my published short stories on my website The Last Thing the Author Said, or sometimes the stories themselves. I also post unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.

Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.

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Average rating: 4.19 · 31 ratings · 11 reviews · 17 distinct works

	Ploughshares Fall 2021 by Ladette Randolph, Leslie Kirk Campbell (Goodreads Author), Afsheen Farhadi (Goodreads Author) 3.85 avg rating — 13 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Laikonik Express 4.33 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 2011 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	EconoClash Review #3: Quality Cheap Thrills by Max Sheridan (Goodreads Author), Michael Bracken (Goodreads Author), Sara Bauer 4.50 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2018 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2020 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Cleopatra's Script liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2022	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Fortune Teller's Factotum liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2023 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Émigré Engineer it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2021	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Dali Squiggle 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2024 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Last Thing the Angel Said 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2025 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

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J.D. Salinger: A Life

by Kenneth Slawenski

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Nick Sweeney rated a book it was amazing Searching For Schindler: The true story behind the Booker Prize winning novel 'Schindler's Ark' by Thomas Keneally	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 21, 2025 05:42AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Searching For Schindler by Thomas Keneally. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Searching For Schindler by Thomas Keneally <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Nick Sweeney rated a book liked it Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jan 05, 2025 08:48AM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Nick Sweeney is now following Marisha Pessl Author of Night Film
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Nick’s Quotes

“It is a terrible moment when you realise you’ll never do all the best things this world can offer; that you’ll never have a superlative experience. You’ll go to a Gala Bingo rather than Vegas; get your own office, but not be a CEO; and get a gravestone, but not in Poet’s Corner. You’ll never sleep with the girls on the TV. And all of this mediocrity was made worse by the fact of its inescapable prevalence.”
― Django Wylie

tags: humor, life, life-lessons, mediocrity

3 likes

“It occurred to the man that the biggest problem with this staid world was the overwhelming demand for conformity. Everything was so eerily definitive: assent to the mandates of society would see you on the rise, but dissent was a steady downward path.”
― Django Wylie, The Middle

tags: conformity, life, life-lessons, puns, wordplay

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.”
― Django Wylie, The Middle

tags: herman-melville, jane-austen, moby-dick, pride-and-prejudice, truth, wordplay, writing, writing-craft, writing-life

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Nick’s Friend Comments

Comments (showing 1-4) post a comment »

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message 4: by Richard

Jun 20, 2023 05:59AM

thank you for the friend

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message 3: by Low Price

Aug 04, 2016 05:18PM

Thanks for the add.

We are now on Flipboard, join us there at https://flipboard.com/@LowPriceBooks

We support authors via our free book promotion services, all we ask in return is help growing our network. Invite friends and followers to our Facebook page, Flip and like our books on Flipboard, retweet us on Twitter.

http://lowpricebooks.co
https://www.facebook.com/lowpricebook...
https://flipboard.com/@LowPriceBooks
https://twitter.com/lowpricebooks

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message 2: by Nick

Dec 20, 2013 05:42AM

Cheers, Lilian. (Sorry for the delay in replying!)

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message 1: by Lilian

Nov 19, 2013 12:02PM

Thanks for the book recommendation, Nick. I'll delve into it as soon as I've got through some books for review.

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