about the author

Marcus Toyne fell in love with reading and writing at an early age and has spent his working life as an English teacher, initially in school and later in adult education. He has played ‘cocktail piano’ in hotels. He and his wife, Barbara, have four sons and innumerable grandchildren. Family life has been strenuous, lively and very rewarding, particularly in the 1970s in the Findhorn Foundation Community on the Moray Firth. However, Marcus has now retired from full-time teaching and has been living in Devizes, Wiltshire, for nearly forty years.

about the book

Michael Talbot has spent the last twenty-five years working at the tax office, where he is known ironically to his colleagues as Old Sunbeam. Behind the mask of surly efficiency, Michael is in fact a highly sensitive person who was once a charming and lively little boy of six, until the terrible day when his mother unaccountably disappeared, leaving him to the mercies of his father, Eric, a bully of a man with little sympathy for children who indulges his boisterous sense of fun at his son’s expense. Despite this profoundly unsatisfactory relationship, Michael remains attached to Eric in a dutiful slavish sort of way, continuing to meet him occasionally for lugubrious drinks. And so life might have continued indefinitely until early one morning the phone shrills with a frightening message from the local hospital, galvanising him into frenzied and panic-stricken action and launching him into an extraordinary and terrifying adventure. Michael freely admits that his description of this adventure beggars belief, but however real or unreal it may have been, it has freed him from the stranglehold of the past, so that at last he can move forward into fulfilment in a future full of promise.

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TIME TRAVEL

I had the basic idea for this novel for many years, being the apparent impossibility of travelling back in time, if any changes are made in the past. Such changes would alter all subsequent events, in ........

IN THE END

In the End Long ago in 1970, I visited a medium in North London on the recommendation of a friend – a strange and unique experience I shall not repeat. We sat in her very English lounge and had a cup ........

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