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NOTES FROM NOWHERE
Author’s Notes from Nowhere is a long, often discursive novel which includes elements of both speculative physics and the vagaries of writing. For those uninterested in either, save your money. For anyone who has a more forbearing nature, may I introduce...
Oliver Quinlan. He’s a book editor and since his one successful author, Danny Priest, disappeared Oliver’s life has run off the rails. The disappearace was ideal publicity to boost sales of Priest’s book, he thought, but presumed dead doesn’t necessarily mean dead. For instance, there are those enigmatic postcards sent to Priest’s sister ... and the cremation that didn’t have a body. Worst of all, the whole business has brought to mind another of Oliver’s Anthony Crawford, who was contracted to write a text on quantum mechanics. But it all proved too much and Crawford blew his brains out.
Then there is Anna Anders, a theoretical physicist. She knows nothing of any of this but has been instructed to co-operate with a man named Elliott who has come to interrogate her about a paper she wrote on Hugh Everett and his theory of Probability. Elliott has a typescript supposedly written by Oliver which, he maintains, has a bearing on both Anna’s paper and Everett’s theory. Oliver doesn’t know, nor would he care if he did. He’s been told he’s got a brain tumour. Something which might explain his faulty memory and those odd changes he keeps finding in everything around him. But can the tumour really have any bearing on what is the murder of Danny Priest’s brother-in-law? That thug Bison who is searching for a priceless basalt dog? Or the dead Crawford, still hanging around Oliver’s neck like the proverbial albatross?
Not that Oliver would ever use a hackneyed simile like that . Not in this world ... or possibly any other.
Oliver Quinlan. He’s a book editor and since his one successful author, Danny Priest, disappeared Oliver’s life has run off the rails. The disappearace was ideal publicity to boost sales of Priest’s book, he thought, but presumed dead doesn’t necessarily mean dead. For instance, there are those enigmatic postcards sent to Priest’s sister ... and the cremation that didn’t have a body. Worst of all, the whole business has brought to mind another of Oliver’s Anthony Crawford, who was contracted to write a text on quantum mechanics. But it all proved too much and Crawford blew his brains out.
Then there is Anna Anders, a theoretical physicist. She knows nothing of any of this but has been instructed to co-operate with a man named Elliott who has come to interrogate her about a paper she wrote on Hugh Everett and his theory of Probability. Elliott has a typescript supposedly written by Oliver which, he maintains, has a bearing on both Anna’s paper and Everett’s theory. Oliver doesn’t know, nor would he care if he did. He’s been told he’s got a brain tumour. Something which might explain his faulty memory and those odd changes he keeps finding in everything around him. But can the tumour really have any bearing on what is the murder of Danny Priest’s brother-in-law? That thug Bison who is searching for a priceless basalt dog? Or the dead Crawford, still hanging around Oliver’s neck like the proverbial albatross?
Not that Oliver would ever use a hackneyed simile like that . Not in this world ... or possibly any other.
492 pages, Paperback
Published January 24, 2023
About the author
David J. Oldman
14 books11 followersBorn into the austerity of post-war Britain, David J Oldman began writing in his early twenties and is now unable to break the habit. Frequently humorous, and often deceptively moving, his books are an examination of ordinary people caught up in life-changing events beyond their control. He presently lives with his wife in the New Forest in the south of England, adjusting to a life just beyond his own control while pursuing his deep interest in history, writers and writing
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