Sample Of Novel

Random Acts of Heroic Love is a novel with two intertwining threads. The first, set now, is the story of a man coming to terms with the loss of his girlfriend in a road accident in which he was present but about which he can remember nothing. The second is loosely based on the true story of my grandfather who fought for the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI and was captured by the Russians in 1915. He was sent to a POW camp in Siberia. Kept alive by his love for a girl he hardly knew, he escaped in 1917 and spent three years walking back home across Russia through deathly winters, through war and revolution until eventually he made it back to his village.

If you want to know whether he finds her and how these two threads come together then you're going to have to buy the book. In the meantime read the first chapter here.




The mind after a sharp blow to t he head is like a house after a hurricane; unrecognisable shards, shreds and splinters. Fragments of memory lie scattered in the wreckage. All the pieces are there, somewhere - but the landscape is so distorted that, stumbling across them, the brain has no idea what they are or where they are from.

“Where is Eleni?”

“Muerta,” says the doctor.

Leo’s eyes close, he is oddly calm watching the bomb hurtle towards him. One last look before he is swept away. He searches his mind and does not recognise the view. A thick fog smothers everything; he can just make out a few faintly familiar shapes. Muerta. He already knows she is dead. At the point of asking he had no idea but when he hears the answer it sounds like the confirmation of a memory he can’t seem to bring to his mind. Something lurches out of the blur into sharp focus. Eleni. Droplet brown eyes, rich hank of ebony curls, bundle of electric energy, singing. Always singing like others breathe. For a fleeting moment he feels her brightness and warmth. They were like a single atom, indivisible.


“Can I see her?”

“No es buena idea”

“Where is she?”

“Here, in another room.”


“Please let me see her”


“Venga” he says softly and indicates the door.

It is only then that Leo realises he is lying on a bed and that he must have been unconscious. His waking words were for Eleni. Something of that delirious soup lingers with him. Why does the doctor speak Spanish? The question hangs in his thoughts like a piece of string whose other end is lost in the haze. He pulls it and a thread emerges from the fog. A memory clings to it. ‘I’m in Latin America. I came here with Eleni. But where? Guatemala? No, we flew to Colombia from there. Colombia then? No.’ He tugs at the string harder. ‘No not Colombia. After Colombia came Ecuador. Ecuador what comes after Ecuador. Where were we going next?’ He pulls harder, the twine is fraying. ‘Peru. From Ecuador to Peru. How? How did we get to Peru?’ The string snaps. ‘No memory of getting to Peru. I must be in Ecuador or Peru. Probably Ecuador. I can’t remember Peru.’ He contemplates the broken thread, he has no idea where to find the other end. He is at the edge of a hole whose size is as yet unfathomable. He stares into the void like a senile man who in a moment of lucidity knows that his mind is lost.

He pulls himself to his feet. His head swirls and he puts his hand on the bed to steady himself. He blinks hard and tries to focus on the enamel basin on the wall opposite. One of the taps dribbles annoyingly; it must have been leaking for years because the water has left an ugly brown stain in the sink. Wherever he is it is in a state of neglect. The paint peels from the walls and thick spiders webs hang undisturbed in the corners. A solitary gecko surveys the scene from the ceiling. The doctor takes him by the arm and leads him down a corridor.

They stop in front of a closed door. Leo knows she is on the other side. The doctor pushes it open. Eleni lies on a trolley bed. There is blood on her blue shirt; her shoulder is out of joint. There is a graze on her cheek. Now the bomb hits. Something inside him yields and the full implication of events explodes inside him. His blood thunders out of control, coursing through him like a river that has burst its banks; legs shudder and give way at the knees; breath shortens and rasps in the throat. His heart rejects the returning blood and empties itself; stomach locks, sending undigested waste crashing into the colon; anus pulls tight to prevent evacuation. His nose charges with fluid mucus, eyes blink obsessively, vision blurs with tears. He collapses to the floor and screams a high guttural scrape. Nurses three rooms away stop in their tracks like mothers responding to a babies cry. People come running from all directions. The doctor closes the door. A murmuring crowd gathers outside. Some of the people know what has happened. They are witnesses who are being treated in the clinic themselves. They have been wondering what would happen when the gringo came round and was told his girlfriend had died. “My God” they have been saying, “when that boy wakes up…it is too terrible to contemplate.” And they cross themselves and thank Jesus that they will see their loved ones again.


“Electric shock. Have you got shock treatment. Er.. choc electrico. Tienes?”

“No hay signor. Esta Muerta.”


“She’s alive. She’s breathing. Did you hear it?”


“Signor, signor!” the doctor places his hand again on Leo’s shoulder. He ignores it, his heart is flying, he almost wants to laugh.

“Signor, she is not breathing. It is your breath coming back from her lungs.”


“Matyamou, Karthiamou, Psychemou.”

My eyes, my heart, my soul.



The story has spread through the hospital and the crowd outside the door have been overcome by that unsavoury curiosity that grips people in the face of tragedy. Someone pushes open the door. They see a man ravaged in grief his face raw and twisted and next to him a small woman lying gnarled and lifeless on a bed. As one they draw in a sharp breath and for a moment their faces mirror his.

“Go away, clear off. This is not a freak show. Leave me alone…” And even as he speaks Leo’s voice cracks and fades away. They have seen enough, they are ashamed and someone closes the door.

The episode triggers a thought in his clouded mind. Why do I recognise those people? He turns to the doctor.

“What is the date?”

“It is the second of April, signor”

“The second of April?” he searches desperately inside for a connection.

“Where am I?”

“Latacunga signor.”

Latacunga – he knows the name. Yes now he remembers that he has been through Latacunga before. There is a busy market in the town square. He changed buses there with Eleni to go into the mountains. He is in Ecuador.

“What date is it?” He forgets that he has just asked this question.

“It is the second of April”

“The second of April?”

“What happened?”

“You were in a bus crash signor.”


“What date is it?” He wonders if he has asked this question before.

“The second of April, signor” The doctor repeats patiently.

“What year?”


Leo grapples with the year. He set off in 1991. When in 1991? The end, near the end. December 1991. So what happened over the last four months. A small light switches on and he sees himself lying on a beach with Eleni. It is New Years Eve they have taken a day trip from Cartagena in Colombia to a tropical island. Eleni is wearing her pink swimsuit. They lie there in sunbleached bliss with the surf at their feet. He turns to her and kisses her warm cheek.


Eleni smiles, leans over and kisses him. “Let’s photograph it,” she says. She takes out their small instant camera and holds it at arms length above their heads and points it towards them. They check their positions in the reflection on the lens and take the picture. Click.

He looks down at her corpse. The memory acts like a pair of hands that plough through his breast bone, rip open his rib cage and expose his heart to the elements. His spine melts away and he stands before his dead lover like a piece of limp flesh. He cannot breathe. His only thought now is that he wants to die and go with her.


His right shoulder is badly bruised and his hip joint fires sharp warning shots up his back. He realises that he has suffered injuries all down his right side. But worst of all is his right knee. He cannot bend it or even feel it. How could he not notice the pain until now?

What is the date he wonders? He is too embarrassed to ask again. The door opens. The crowd has disappeared. A policeman enters and asks him to accompany him to the bus station to identify his bags. Leo is reluctant to leave Eleni’s side but he is strangely open to suggestion. There is no fight left in him and he obediently follows the policeman out of the room. The doctor follows and Eleni is left in peace.

“What is your name?” asks the policeman.

“Leo Deakin”

“It is very close Leo, it won’t take a minute,” he says in Spanish.

They step out of the clinic into the blinding evening sun and a wall of heat. The huge central plaza sprawls before them. A bustling South American market in full flow. On one side live cattle are being auctioned, llamas and cows foul the floor and chickens, foot-tied in hanging clusters, fill the air with fevered clucking. The fruit sellers sit on blankets in rows with their produce fanned out before them and the wealthy Otovalo Indians, hair in long plaits, hawk their multicoloured hand-woven hammocks and ponchos. Leo breaks out into a sweat. How unbearable the world is, so callous and indifferent. He shudders and recoils like a snake prodded with a stick. Lives beset with trivia and humdrum chores. Tedious mundane pathetic existences spent serving material gain. He is looking at the world through binoculars held the wrong way round. All is small and distant, unreachable and detached. He belongs to another world now, a bubble where he can hear his heart beat and feel his skin wrinkle. The market place is a muffle a million miles way. Sounds are cushioned and unreal. He is under water and no one notices that he is drowning.

On his previous visit to that square he and Eleni could barely walk a yard before being swamped by hawkers and draped in clothes or jewellery they did not want. They resisted all offers until Leo caught sight of two tiny carved Inca heads, one male and one female. He bought them without bartering, and gave the male head to Eleni as a keepsake.

But now as he walks through the square the traders instinctively turn away. For once he is avoided and ignored. There is something in the eye of this man who is locked in a state of tragic bewilderment that disturbs the stallholders and dries the throat. This man is definitely not on a shopping spree.


As they walk back across the square Leo’s eyes flick side to side as he desperately tries to remember. Neurons and synapses spark inside him and suddenly something bolts out of the gloom. They are in a mountain hire shop in Quito. Leo loved climbing mountains; it was one of the most perfect pleasures in life. Perfect, because once you had gained the summit you knew you could go no further. You had a complete sense of achievement. This was a rare sensation for him in a life where so many activities were on going, never ending, where you had to look into the future for any sign of contentment. Cotopaxi which towered over the plateau like an alluring cone-shaped exotic dessert was going to be a huge challenge. The assistant in the shop told them to spend the night at the mountain lodge at 5000metres, maybe even two nights to acclimatise. He advised them to set off at 2 a.m. on the day of the climb so as to reach the summit for dawn and return before the afternoon thaw which would be treacherous. Crampons and picks would be a necessity but if the weather held the walk would not be too difficult.

“Are you both going to the top?” he asked.

“Not me,” said Eleni. “I’m climbing to the lodge and that’s as far as I go.”

“Don’t take any risks,” he warned, “a couple of novices died up there last year.”

He recalls eating breakfast. They had gone to their favourite café near their hotel. He had eaten a fruit salad with granola and honey. ‘Breakfast of the Gods’ he had called it; pineapple, maracuya, mango and passion fruit. As he recalls it he tastes it again. Eleni had scoffed down a banana pancake with melted chocolate and could not prevent the hot sauce dribbling down her chin. They had lingered over coffee. Afterwards they had returned to their hotel and picked up their heavy backpacks and set off for the bus station. There it was at last, the bus station. They were later than they had planned by over an hour. Would Eleni be alive now if they hadn’t taken so long over breakfast? His memory stops at the bus station; he still cannot see any aspect of the journey in his mind. Perhaps it is better not to know but he cannot seem to stop his thoughts racing. The holes are slowly filling up and despite itself the brain will work until the job is completed.