Brief Encounters of the Third Kind

by Janet Gogerty, Colin Gogerty (Photographer)

In the early years of the Twenty First Century, widow Susan Dexter has more to worry about than the recession. For thirty years she has kept a secret; she is not sure if her daughter is human. New events lead her to other people who need to find the truth. How do ordinary people cope with the extraordinary?Mystery, music and medicine are at the heart of this family saga; sub plots are woven amongst several very different love stories, as the characters question what it is to be human and what is reality.

781 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 3, 2013

About the author

I have lived in various places and done a variety of jobs, even started a couple of careers, but not a day of a writer's life is wasted. From the chicken farm in suburban Perth, Australia to the Easter Egg production line in Croyden, London, from Harrod's toy department at Christmas to First Class passenger lounges at Heathrow Airport, the many people I have met are not forgotten.
Places are also important and inspire my stories, but when everyday folk experience strange events that's when my imagination takes flight. But you won't find strange planets and creatures with weird names. My characters are the people who live next door.

Reviews

[Audrey Driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

A description of this book by its author: "A family saga of three generations and three families set over three years early in the Twenty-First Century. A thriller of music, medicine and mystery entwined with tales of unrequited love, love lost and found and love crossing impossible boundaries. But most of all this is a story of ordinary folk who are your neighbours, who sit next to you on the bus. They work, shop, cook and look after families, while keeping secret the inexplicable events that have changed their lives."

That describes the book exactly. "Saga" is right, because it is a long book with a large cast of characters, related by only one of them, widow Susan Dexter, who is the mother and grandmother of quite a few of the others. The plot unfolds in a long series of scenes, with many, many conversations. The characters (except for one) do not sound particularly different from one another (perhaps not surprising, since many of them are related), but they are quite distinctive in their beliefs, actions, and choices. The amazing events involving Susan and her daughter Emma early in the book underlie the plot, but at times they are obscured by domesticity. Halfway through, that element pretty much takes over, in a whirlwind of visits, cooking, cups of tea, shopping trips, garden work, and babies. Babies are a huge part of this story.

Even with the slow middle section, it is an engrossing book. Narrator Susan describes everything clearly and thoroughly. She is not a scientist, which may justify the scantiness of medical and scientific details, even though the plot involves both. I was almost always eager to see what happened next and even more so to find out how the science-fictional elements played out. At the three-quarter point, the action picks up and revelations are made that eventually lead to an intriguing climax.

I especially enjoyed the references to music, and the implication that classical musicians can be as charismatic as pop stars. The author also inserted references to media (mostly newspapers and television) to represent the social environment in which the story plays out.
(A couple of niggly punctuation details: at first, I kept noticing instances where I thought commas should be replaced by full stops, but eventually I got used to them. And the absence of quotation marks at the beginnings of second and subsequent paragraphs spoken by characters were slightly confusing at times.)