Walk On, Bright Boy

by Charles Davis

A touching account of friendship and betrayal in Moorish Spain, Walk On, Bright Boy evokes the pleasures and purposes of walking as a way of engaging with life. Marrying a coming-of-age tale with Gothic horror, it is at once an adventure story, a celebration of the power of dreams, magic and illusion, and an uplifting fable about the joys of living, even in the shadow of death. Both timely and timeless, it can be read as an allegory of contemporary political expediencies and as a parable of personal enlightenment.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2007

About the author

Basically, middle-class boy born in the suburbs of London in 1960.

After a dissolute time at university, it occurred to me that if I wanted to write, I'd better get on and write something (I’m sharp like that), so I sat down and, through my mid to late twenties, churned out a novel a year. I always found plenty of publishers and agents ready to read these outpourings, but since I never took the trouble to rewrite them, they were all rejected and rightly so.

At the same time, more or less by accident, I got a job teaching in Sudan. Spent 15 months there, but decided to come back to Europe.

Next job took me to Turkey, where I met Jeannette, a French maths teacher sixteen years older than me, a disparity in age that allowed us to become friends before it occurred to us that we might actually make a couple. We recently celebrated our twentieth non-wedding anniversary.

Jeannette wanted to go to South America, I wanted to go to China, so naturally we ended up in Ivory Coast.

I’ve since published fourteen walking guides (mainly about Spain, mainly with Discovery Walking Guides) and an alternative ‘guide’ to Brittany, Jeannette’s birthplace, where we now live an absurdly privileged life with a couple of dogs whose lives are even more absurdly privileged.