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Knowing Simone
It's the time of an exiled Victor Hugo, France led by an aging, repressive French Empire under Napoleon III. Marseilles anarchist Patrice is a 24 yr old with a false identity. When he meets Simone, 36, an ambitious Pyrenees mine owner in gothic Lectoure, Patrice is caught in her erotic web, struggling with new identities that liberate and complicate their lives. He is obsessed with 'knowing' Simone's mysterious connections to his father, Paris and Napoleon III's government. She is obssessed with her developing her enterprise and other, more mysterious activities. When threatening forces arise, they form an unlikely alliance to against Minister Jessia, Lectoure's Sub-prefect and their formidable allies. With dynamite in his hands, and French Empire Minister s opening their new railway, Patrice is tempted with violent solutions. Look forward to duels, confrontations, riots, murder, kidnapping and band of republicans intend on reclaiming France.
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First published February 4, 2015
About the author
Garry Robert McDougall
16 books6 followersTrouble! From a sports-crazed childhood, and his first scribblings incinerated by a irate headmaster. High school success meant they couldn't refuse his university entry, where he soon led the Anti-War movement, initiated sit-ins and subsequent arrests. By burning his 'draft-card' and opposing military conscription, he soon landed in gaol.
Finding travel more fun, on his overland trip from Singapore to Amsterdam, he met Yasser Arafat, lived with gypsies, trekked Nepal, took a life-changing trip in Pakistan, and fell in love with France.
After two years pretending to be a Maths teacher, he studied the Art and co-created the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, a long-distance walking track to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. They refused him an Honour and threw him off the Board when he objected to a cigarette company sponsorship.
After publication of Great North Walk and NSW Heritage Walks, he started a successful business, Great Australian Walks. This fifteen-year stint involved numerous media events, interviews, and TV Travel shows. Exhausted by 2000, he returned to art, and began writing poetry, short stories and novels.
After a stint of Adult Ed, Artist-in-Residence and lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, he completed his first novel, 'Belonging'. A second novel, 'Starts With C,' was followed up with a third, 'Knowing Simone', and a fourth, 'Blacksmith and Canon'. The fifth,' A Blacksmith’s Life' has been followed by 'Sea Voices', with a seventh, 'Renaissance', in the making.
Two inspired travel books Damn! and Border and Soul, plus ten other books on the Spanish, French and Portuguese Caminos de Santiago, make him the pilgrimage path’s most prolific author.
Garry co-initiated the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, was President of Balmain Institute for seven years, and on the executive of the South Coast Writers Centre. A member of DiVerse (ekphrasis poets) and the Write-On novelist's group, he won the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize with Patting the Dog, exhibits paintings and photographs, was Feature Poet at the Sydney Writers Festival, and won the Art-In-Unusual-Place Grant in 2022.
Practising “Anarchic Rhyme” is all art forms, he masquerades as Hugo Hugo, a 510 yr. old who bemoans his birth as too late for the best of the Renaissance, though passionate for every age of human folly.
Every so often, he wonders his own follies.
Finding travel more fun, on his overland trip from Singapore to Amsterdam, he met Yasser Arafat, lived with gypsies, trekked Nepal, took a life-changing trip in Pakistan, and fell in love with France.
After two years pretending to be a Maths teacher, he studied the Art and co-created the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, a long-distance walking track to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. They refused him an Honour and threw him off the Board when he objected to a cigarette company sponsorship.
After publication of Great North Walk and NSW Heritage Walks, he started a successful business, Great Australian Walks. This fifteen-year stint involved numerous media events, interviews, and TV Travel shows. Exhausted by 2000, he returned to art, and began writing poetry, short stories and novels.
After a stint of Adult Ed, Artist-in-Residence and lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, he completed his first novel, 'Belonging'. A second novel, 'Starts With C,' was followed up with a third, 'Knowing Simone', and a fourth, 'Blacksmith and Canon'. The fifth,' A Blacksmith’s Life' has been followed by 'Sea Voices', with a seventh, 'Renaissance', in the making.
Two inspired travel books Damn! and Border and Soul, plus ten other books on the Spanish, French and Portuguese Caminos de Santiago, make him the pilgrimage path’s most prolific author.
Garry co-initiated the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, was President of Balmain Institute for seven years, and on the executive of the South Coast Writers Centre. A member of DiVerse (ekphrasis poets) and the Write-On novelist's group, he won the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize with Patting the Dog, exhibits paintings and photographs, was Feature Poet at the Sydney Writers Festival, and won the Art-In-Unusual-Place Grant in 2022.
Practising “Anarchic Rhyme” is all art forms, he masquerades as Hugo Hugo, a 510 yr. old who bemoans his birth as too late for the best of the Renaissance, though passionate for every age of human folly.
Every so often, he wonders his own follies.
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