Help me find the readers who will love this book

Aim: Hello! I'm launching this crowdfunder to support and promote my second novel Partisan, which will be published in print in autumn 2025

Partisan campaign 2025

What people say about Partisan:

"Vivid, outstanding... A wonderful story" "Impressive scale, substantial themes" "Lots to admire" "Acute... enjoyable" "A lovely writer"

I'm publishing Partisan in September 2025. It's available now for pre-order.

I've launched this crowdfunder as a place to tell potential readers more about it, and a bit more about me, and a bit more about why I wrote it; about its characters and why I love them and why I hope you'll love them too.

And if you'd like to read it, then ordering it here will help get the book off to a good start, help persuade bookshops to stock it when it ships -- and help pay (some of) the up-front publishing costs.

Over the 32 days of this campaign I'll be posting samples from chapters; a reading you can download as a podcast (and find on podcast platforms too); and more about the novel itself and the stories it tells.

So I hope you'll follow along!

Meanwhile if you're curious you can read some of my other writing at disintermediated.blog, where I post about writing and reading, books and publishing, and the things which happen in life's margins. And you can read my piece about the Flixbus from Paris in the latest issue of Elsewhere Journal,  ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶e̶s̶t̶e̶r̶d̶a̶y̶  just published.

What's the novel about?

Partisan is a novel which weaves together two stories which unfold in two different times -- "then", the awful times of war; and "now", the ordinary, everyday present.

The war story unfolds in the wild hills of the north of Italy, in 1943 and 1944. The German army has swept in to occupy the north of the country as the Allies make their slow advance from the south.

Partisans launch a war of resistance, and a bitter war of retribution follows.

What happens when you get caught up in such a war? How do you get caught up in it? Can you avoid getting caught up in it? And if you could avoid it, should you? It's not what you ever wanted for your life, but you have to make a choice. Dante, a teacher in Genoa, is faced with such a choice.

The "now" story unfolds in 2008, the novel's present, the year of the crash, the year the banks stole our money. It's the family summer holiday; ordinary times in the mid-years of a marriage and the mid-years of two lives. The "crash" is a distant event, but it seems to seep into everything.

Richard is blocked on the book he's supposed to deliver at the end of the summer. He's 43 and he isn't where he set out to be in life. And maybe their life together isn't exactly what Evie wants either. She's mourning her mother, and it's making her think about her own life and what it all means and is it enough?

So these are the two situations from which the stories emerge and tangle.

And it's the children -- Richard and Evie's two children, Laura and Freddy -- having the adventure of their lives, who propel the collision of then and now.

Their summer holiday is in those very same hills where the partisan war unfolded, all those years ago. And it's the place -- the landscape and its rhythms and its layers of history -- which creates the space in which the stories collide.

And I don't really want to say much more because I don't want to spoil it for you.

What will the money go towards?

The baseline target amount will almost pay the print bills for a small edition, plus the platform (crowdfunder) per-pledge and project percentage fees, and the postage for the reward copies when they're ready.

Beating the target would allow me to increase the edition size, though the likely limit for this edition is 1000 copies.

There's much more that it won't pay for -- artwork, design, typesetting -- and all sorts of "hidden" up-front costs -- font licences, tools, ISBNs, EU GPSR formalities so copies can ship to Northern Ireland (thankyou, Brexit!), publisher's stock insurance, it's endless -- never mind author royalties! But if I can cover some of the big costs with advance sales through a crowdfunder, then it gives me room to breathe.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 18th July 2025 at 11:59pm