Elfland – Fiction, coming in 2023
A Novel of the Seventies
Elfland is the author’s first real crack at writing a full-length work of fiction.
It’s set in the Coromandel of the late 1970s, and is about a young, wandering teacher-musician-builder who ends up in a small communal settlement near Coromandel township. It’s a love story with all the usual twists and turns that involves, but it also draws on the tenor of the times as some of the innocence of New Zealand had begun to dissipate and crime and drugs became more pervasive.
The novel takes its seed – and title – from a Steeleye Span ballad, Thomas the Rhymer, though it’s a more complex tale than the original.
It’s also, for the author, an attempt to capture some of the charm and simplicity of those times and that decade, one he remembers more than fondly as a time of major transition personally.
Tentative publication date is mid/late 2023.