David Bailey
David’s debut publication in 2021 was Seventeen, a football fantasy adventure novel aimed at and beyond young adults. Them Roper Girls (2022) returned to a world more recognisably our own, tracing in their own voices the lives of four sisters over more than sixty years from their 1950s childhood. A husband of a Roper sister takes centre stage in Them Feltwell Boys (2023). With the same gritty realism and sometimes dark humour found in its predecessor, this follows Ray Roden’s crude attempts at teenage love in counterpoint to his cynical womanising as an adult. The Sunny Side of the House (2024) is a first venture into non-fiction in another projected series, When Life Gives You Strawberries – Memories of a Fenland Boy. The origin story of Seventeen appears within the clear-eyed narrative of a 1960s boyhood in East Anglia, where both David’s contemporary novels are partly set. He currently lives in the Midlands.
To read more of and about David’s work, including a quarterly newsletter and new content daily comprising extracts from diaries and other writing over more than fifty years, visit his website www.davidgbailey.com.
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Sunny Side of the House
by David G Bailey
You can't choose your mum and dad, even when they choose you.
​​​In my early teens I had a taste for horror comics. In one strip I read of a handsome young couple at last alone in their honeymoon suite. He is crisply suited, clean-cut. She, lovely in her wedding finery, offers him the chance to watch her disrobe.
The bride is not shy. She reveals herself, frame by frame, to be a hideous crone gloating at having tricked her new husband. He is unfazed, setting her to screaming as he removes his own head to stow it, grinning still, under his arm. Years later, when I thought of writing a memoir or fictionalised account of my parents’ marriage, the title I toyed with was ‘The Hag and the Head’.
If this gripping narration of a 1960s Fenland boyhood sometimes reads like fiction, the detailed evocation of characters and events, by turns humorous and traumatic, anchors it in remembered facts. The author does not soft-pedal the dysfunction at the core of a wide, supportive family in which the boy faces adult challenges, including jarring discoveries about his parents’ separate and shared history.
Visit www.davidgbailey.com and author facebook page at bit.ly/D-G-B
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Publisher : SilverWood Books (17th August 2024)
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ISBN-10 : 1800422822​
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ISBN-13 978-1800422827
Them Feltwell Boys
by David G Bailey
If women are so much trouble, Ray, why do you always want more than one?
Parallel narratives of a schoolboy's developing first love affair and his career and marriage unravelling 25 years later eventually converge at a school reunion.
Ray Roden is a Fenland schoolboy in trouble with teachers and friends as well as women after his boys' grammar merges with the girls' high. He has already met Tina: that girl would give me some of the best moments of my life. And the worst.
Ray Roden is an insurance executive travelling the Caribbean in trouble with his job, his wife (one of them Roper girls), his children - and still women: this last ten days I've been kicked out of their beds by my wife, my girlfriend and a ...another one. And then there is Hurricane Martin, 'storm of the century,' heading straight for his home in Puerto Rico.
Alongside humorous scenes in Ray's unenlightened development from schoolboy clumsiness to mid life crisis mismanagement are grimmer adult ones including adultery, alcohol abuse, physical and sexual assault. Will he emerge from his school reunion with more than one, one,'the one' or no woman at all?
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Publisher : SilverWood Books (2nd August 2023)
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ISBN-10 : 1800422555
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ISBN-13 : 978-1800422551
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Them Roper Girls
by David G Bailey
They were beauties all right, them Roper girls - but sometimes even four aces don't make a winning hand.
In an unsettled 1950's household, how will the sisters come up from their shipwrecked childhood? Facing issues including domestic and sexual abuse, physical and mental illness, they struggle to offer their own children a better legacy. Follow them over sixty years to see if all the siblings make it safely to shore.
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Angela: Whatever rumours you may have heard, I never knew Dad say my third sister Karen wasn't his.
Janet: She had promised that on her sixteenth birthday she would finally let him go all the way.
Lucy: I think Jan was away at Guides' camp when I got run over.
Karen: Don't think I'll be rambling on like Ange ... I wouldn't want to leave you only her version, talk about unreliable memoirs.
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Publisher: SilverWood Books (17th July 2022)
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ISBN-10 : 180042227X
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ISBN-13 : 978-1800422278
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Seventeen
by David G Bailey
He will take seventeen to the match - How many will he bring back?
In Cibola football is a matter of life and death. Sir Tristram must reunite his Blood City teammates - Knights, Pirates and Westerners - to win the prestigious Seskie tournament against their oldest rivals.
Behind the football match is a bigger power play, a kings mission to bring down his greatest rival by persuasion, trickery or force. Needing a squad of soldiers as well as footballers, Sir Tristram must also find a place on tour and in his heart for the teenage child he has not addressed by name since infancy ....
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Published by SilverWood books (17th July 2021)
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ISBN-10 1800421397
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ISBN-13 978-1800421394