Enlightenment: A Novella about Finding Your Own Way

by Chris West

‘To thine own self be true!’
Those are the words that light up the imagination of quiet student Stella Tranter in conformist 1970s Outer London.
But how do you actually do that? It’s the time of the punk revolution and Stella gets involved – but secretly she prefers philosophy to pogoing and Mozart to Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Throwing away the safety pins, she marries nice, reliable but unimaginative Bobby. Is this what she truly desires? Freedom beckons, but freedom can be lonely and deeply terrifying…
This is a story about the difficult business of creating your own path, about the pain of facing up to things we'd rather avoid, about the scary, sometimes funny, sometimes surprising reality of putting those words – ‘To thine own self be true!’ – into practice.

165 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 7, 2016

About the author

I grew up in a country village north of London. As a boy I filled endless notebooks with stories - not all of them finished! As a young man I played in various (unsuccessful) bands, then worked in the City of London. I studied philosophy and economics as a 'mature' student (though I wasn't very mature). After leaving uni I went backpacking in China, and wrote a book about that adventure which came out in 1991. Since then, writing has (along with family) been at the heart of my life, though I've had other jobs, too, largely in Marketing and PR, working with small businesses. In 2008, I found an old stamp album in the attic of my parents' old house, and became fascinated by the contents and the way they seemed to mirror history. Each stamp was a tiny, rectangular time machine! In the end, I had to write a book along these lines: A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps was the result. I have now done the same for the USA - a fascinating journey into American history (and a great pleasure to collect the nation's stamps). I live in North Hertfordshire with my wife and daughter.

a.k.a Christopher West|6453491].

Reviews

[Nigel Kotani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fun, diverting and smart. It covers the heroine's life from student days to early middle-age as she swerves repeatedly from the conventionally stable side of the road to the existentialist crisis side of the road and back again. Although pretty original, towards the very end of the book I suddenly realised that it reminded me of another book I've read: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It has the same simplicity, the same sense of journey, the same eclectic and constantly changing voyage through life and the same sense that the path is ultimately a circle. Fortunately, it takes itself a little less seriously than does Siddhartha.