Bøker av Antony J Stowers

¿It's peculiar to know that some solid objects have been demolished or destroyed and people have died and can no longer be seen or touched apart from through photographs, films or memories. They've become ghosts. For some, anchors are important and for others unimportant. Cutting the chains can free us to move on to new waters but cutting too many can see us drifting in a way we can't always control. Finding the balance between them is tricky and what I hope I have achieved here - a flirtatious dance with the past: my hometown Darlington as I remember it from earlest memories in 1968 up until 1978.

'Imagination links with memory' is a quote attributed to the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and one which he passed on as advice to many apprentice artists including Paul Gauguin, the title chosen to reflect this quote as it sums up what this book of short stories is: memories mixed up like colours on a Degas palette with liberal sprinkling of contemporary adult imagination. This collection of short stories - featuring 'Take a bow', 'What the butler saw', 'Josephine Shakespeare' and 'Monkey Jack' - set in Darlington in the 1970's does exactly that: links the distant, childhood and youthful memories of the author Jethro Anson Nowsty with his own contemporary imagination in this the third instalment of his life.

Every year for one week in July or August, the Nowsty family peers suspiciously from the windows of their terraced house in Darlington as if the weather is about to play yet another intentionally cruel deception. They pray for sun but prepare for rain, slaves to a typically unpredictable British summer that sometimes seems intentionally malicious rather than casually reassuring. Yes, it's time for summer holidays! But never mind - let's leave all that doom and gloom behind for a little while and escape back to the good old days before everything began to go to pieces, back to the English working-class world of half a century ago when life was just as complicated but expectations more simple.

75 benefit giro cheques 5,000 miles of roads 1 Mohican hair style 5 self-penned theatre plays 4 books of poems 6 underground fanzines 3 radio interviews 2 general elections 1 miner's strike 1 Falklands war 1 Greenham Common 10 unrequited and 1 love story 1 typewriter 7 acting roles 3 drama schools and 1 life lived - to the max. A wonderful and detailed diary of what it was like to be young and innocent in a small northern English town in the early 1980's and in a world which was just a little less complicated than today. Wallow in lost innocence and nostalgia and glimpse a world that could be again, if only . . . . Also includes 'This is where we live' first published Jan 1985 and The Bond Letters - exchanges from 1983 to 1985 with British playwright legend Edward Bond.

Plunge head-first into the mad adventures of Jethro Anson Nowsty, our ordinary and modest English hero, an innocent abroad, doing daily battle with the (often) frustrating but (equally) fascinating workings of modern France from 2016 up to the present date. Embracing teaching, motoring trips to Holland and Belgium, Catholic hypocrisy, gilets-jaunes, strikes and stoppages, absurd administrations, vandalised cars, hitchhiking, Swedish drama, a bizarre visitor, Brexit, a crippling bike accident, burn-out and the arrival of COVID-19, 'All glory is fleeting' is both an amusing and unsettling testament to the folly of human complacency and what it really means to be a Brit abroad.

Being the uneventful and rather plain story of the childhood and youth of one Jethro Anson Nowsty, an ordinary boy from an ordinary working class family in an ordinary town in Darlington, north east England, from his first tentative steps into the adult world of work in the summer of 1979, aged 15, then backwards in time, via his youth, education and family, recalling the many lively characters that informed his personality, to his earliest memories in 1967 and all told through short stories over twenty-nine chapters.

Set in Regency England 1810-1825, 'No. 1' draws on the real and the imagined from the North East of England present at the birth of the railways, starting on 18th September 1810 and finishing there on 28th September 1825, the day after the first ever railway trip between two towns, a first that changed history. History didn't record it inadvertently carrying a boy fleeing from a miscarriage of justice and an ex-Waterloo veteran intent on silencing him, but history can now be straightened out. In this ambitious recreation by Darlington-born writer Antony J (Tony) Stowers, fact and fiction are blended through real-life personalities, known historical events and ordinary people whose lives were impacted by this revolutionary technology. It also features a re-imagined but detailed account of the opening itself on 27th September 1825. This is a special limited 500 edition print run featuring the cover by Terence Cuneo and available exclusively to buyers/residents of the United Kingdom.

This is a book for those who smoke and want to stop and for those who've stopped but need reassurance. I'm the latter. I started and stopped four times and this final time was the last. I'm never going to take the crown from Allan Carr for writing a practical book about quitting smoking so I've written my own, consisting of cold facts, personal memories, home-spun philosophies and hard life experience. I'll make a deal with you: as long as you're reading this book, you won't smoke. I don't mean just as long as you're physically holding the book in your hands and lifting the words from the page with your eyes, even if you read a little, a few pages, then put it down and go off and do something else and then come back to it again. No. As long as there's a relationship between you and the contents of this book, you won't smoke. Is that a deal? Just remember: there's no dignity in slavery. If you want dignity - you've got to be emancipated.

'All this is mine' (formerly 'A Teesside Voice') is set in London in 1994 and is a strident commentary on the perils of unbridled Thatcherism. Money is designed to buy things but to Rob Barlow, a young but inexperienced, northern-born drug-dealer who has wads of it lying around his upmarket but unfurnished Camden Town apartment, it's only use is to generate more of the same. Despite his decadent, materialistic world where everything has a price, Rob lives on basic instincts - his only friends are customers who pay hm to take risks they daren't. Inevitably, when a mysterious caller starts to threaten Rob, all he can do is wait helplessly as the noose tightens . . .

'The summer of '89' is the rough-and-ready, rapidly-paced first novel from Antony J. Stowers charting both thick and thin slices of the life and times of northerner 'John' from May to August 1989 in London, having returned from a self-imposed six-month exile in Israel after ten hectic years in England's capital. Based on the author's first-hand experiences, it's a portrait of a young man, footloose and fancy free, trying to come to terms with what motivates and drives him forward whilst occasionally coming up for air from the ocean of danger and doubt, strangers and deceit, drugs and drink and casual work and casual sex that he calls 'life'.

The ghost of French painter Paul Gauguin finds temporary sanctuary in the imagination of obscure British writer Antony J Stowers.

A fantastic time-travelling adventure story that takes the reader back to the opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway on 27th September 1825 as seen through the eyes of Lewis Noble, 10.

Volume 4 of 5 features 'The Dishwasher' 2005, 'Confessions of a rock 'n' roll star' 2007, 'Gauguin's Ghost Story' 2009, 'Tommy Greaves' 2014 and 'Unspoken'2019.

Volume 1 of 5 features 'The Waiting Room' 1983, '1979' 1984, 'The Bond' 1984, 'The Conformist' 1985, 'The Crossroads' 1984/85 and 'London Cousins' 1989.

Volume 2 of 5, for young people and family audiences, features 'Harry's Dream' 1997, the story of an unhappy young Harry who suffers bullying in school and an alien who crashlands near his school and helps him overcome his fears. 'My Brother Jake' 1997, is the story of teenager Jake who betrays the trust of his younger brother and their single Mum by dealing drugs. 'Harry's Dream 2' 1998 is a continuation of the themes in the first Harry's Dream with the same characters but a different story. 'Scars' 1998, commissioned by Durham County Council to address vandalism issues amongst young people and tells a story based on real incidents. 'Colours' 1999 is a reaction to racism and a one-man show. 'Eddie' 1999 is a reflective look back on ordinary people and their achievements in the 20th century. 'Cyrano' 1999 is a comedy revamp of both Rostand's original Cyrano de Bergerac and Steve Martin's film 'Roxanne' updated and relocated to a small northern English town. 'The Key', also 1999, written entirely in verse, helps primary age children become aware of the dangers of bad decision-making in the world of household and legal drugs.