Christmas Island

Now when I first went away to sea I believed that there were two Christmas Islands, one in the Indian Ocean and the other in the Pacific, but I was wrong, for there were three if you include the one featured in this book… Well once again it’s a book with a very different type of story so different from anything else you have ever read before.

It is exciting yet mystical, tense, emotional and yet still loving and funny and all divided into  separate stories, each one based on things that have actually  happened in Des’ life. And if that isn’t strange enough, as the book goes on so all the stories somehow manage to come  together in a magical way to create one very unique and special story, a special story that has a truly explosive and exciting finale, the sort of finale that film companies and west end shows would give their hind teeth for.

There is just so much in this book, ranging from settings showing how life used to be years ago; life that was often so hard and yet so full of freedom and adventure.

Is it a family story or a Children’s story or what, well to tell the truth I’m not quite sure, but I know that some of my favorite authors like Charles Dickens and Lewis Carrol wrote stories that appealed to everyone, and Christmas Island falls into that category, for it will lead you through life’s meandering pathways that are full of surprises including coming face to face with the world’s and universe’s mightiest of evils, a creature that has come to destroy all goodness on earth and replace it with evil and death and as its enormous  powers unleash their evil so you find yourselves involved in the almost hopeless battle against them and siding with their number one enemies consisting of the villagers from Ireland, a nine year old boy and his pet monkey, a WW2  Japanese suicide soldier and a few other very good people including the young boys mother, father and and younger sister.

The forces of evil have selected them to be the first to be exterminated because they are such kind, good people, the very things the powers of evil hate most of all and must destroy forever in order for them to take over the world and have their wickedness rule supreme … It is often extremely tense, but you will quickly form an attachment with our main characters as almost individually they fight a helpless battle, a battle that brings with it so much emotion and sadness as against unbelievable odds they fight the powers of evil in their attempt to stop them from destroying the whole of our world.

There are five different stories in this book all involving people the forces of evil have selected because they are so kind and loving, to be destroyed, starting in a small school in Ireland in the 1960s and then to a small Irish village in the 1840s. From there we somehow move on to a small deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and from there  to beautiful New Zealand, Australia and then back north to London in 1945/6…

The way this story unfolds is so difficult to put into shorthand, but fear not for it is engagingly easy to read, as the written words and illustrations take you along fascinating pathways that lead through most of our lives in one way or another, pathways of life that create our own life stories, but in this case almost every step we take so the story, or stories all begin to join up and come together as one in an almost spiritual and magical way, ending with an amazing,
tumultuous finale with the powers of evil finally declaring victory and celebrating the death of their chosen enemies… Or did they?…

It is the sort of finale that any major movie or Broadway/West End show would love to have… It will leave you emotionally stunned, but it will also leave you so happy at how it all comes together in such an unlikely and  triumphant way.

When Des first put pen to paper to write this, all he did was to write the basic draft, but somehow a copy escaped and no fewer than nine major film companies including Disney managed to get hold of it and approached him for the film rights, but as far as he was concerned all they had read was a brief synopsis of a story he had yet to write and so reluctantly, even though strapped for cash at the time,  he turned their offers down … Well that was many years ago and only now has he been able to find the time to write and finish this story in the way he had always wanted to.

We hope you enjoy this… It’s a story you can read as a bedtime story for the grandchildren or you can read and enjoy it yourselves but whatever way, you won’t be disappointed and again, because this is also a very low print run of just two hundred copies, if you do get a copy and should film companies want to take it up again and make it into a feature film,  especially a major such as Disney, then this little book will grow to become an extremely rare and collectible copy… I will happily sign it for you if you like, which would probably also help in such a limited edition to help its collectibility.