Status Updates From The Roundabout Man

Quinn speaks of the pluses of living off the grid - watching the delicate, skilfully woven silk spiders' webs. Lorna is a newspaper reporter, young but with a degree. Quinn corrects her word usage! "I have a literary background". his excuse for the correction.
Back - Quinn's mother kept every document that passed through her hands - letters, photographs, sketches, draft copies of novels, receipts. He keeps none.

Quinn lives just off a huge roundabout, in a tree stand that was there long before the roads, part of an extended wood that was preserved, by an unknown bureaucrat. The voice belongs to a girl, Lorna Steadman. She has been sent by an editor. "Whistling is a dying art, Quinn says." At almost 60 years of age, Quinn wouldn't mind carpets and central heating, but he knows how to take care of himself.

A visitor - a young woman - Is she from the Primrose Valley service station? Quinn speaks of Alzheimer's, which his mother had. Death is not his enemy. The voice brings back memories - "an expectation of obedience". Back in time - Zuleika, one of his sisters, is calling him. His other two sisters are Fleur and Hetty. "Their voices were harsh and shrill outside the silent world of a secret life. "

Quinn's caravan is called Dunromin, typical of the semi-detached streets forming the vertebrae of the country. Quinn has stopped roaming - he's anchored in a secluded tree-filled patch of land, a squatter. The writing is poetic _ "A layer of crystalline whiteness encases every blade of grass...the bare branches of the hawthorn rise stark and spiky into the watery distance of the sky." Beautiful!

I haven't found any profanity so far, and that is refreshing. The first sentence is a great opener. It reminds me of a Dr. Who episode, featuring one of my favorite Dr. Who characters! An endless circle of vehicles doomed to travel around forever. I believe the setting is England as the author mentions lorries, the M6, and South to Penzance and Land's End.

The Blurb from the book: Quinn is the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children's books. But Quinn's of retirement age. Is he a tramp? He lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on leftovers from a nearby motorway service station. This is a fantasy story, as Quinn is that boy immortalized because his mother told the tales about the little boy and his triplet sisters.