Today sees the republication of my first novel The Lock as a Kindle ebook from StreetBooks.
The ebook is available from amazon.co.uk, amazon.com and amazon.de.
That the novel should come out on Kindle seems appropriate given that it first appeared as an ebook back in 2001, two years before it was published in paperback. It went on to be shortlisted for the Independent e-Book Awards in Santa Barbara in 2002.
Regular readers of this blog might recognise the photo on which the Kindle cover is based, which appeared here in June.
The cover shows the last lock on the Oxford Canal before it comes to an abrupt halt at the city centre. The lock and bridge appear in the closing chapters of the novel when Gerald, an unfaithful Oxford don, is on his way to try and make things up with his younger daughter Alison, who lives on a narrowboat called Civil Liberty.
'He marched up, round, over and down the S of the beautiful wrought-iron bridge crossing the last lock. From the top he could see the green roof and purple side of Civil Liberty. As before there was a column of smoke rising from its stack. The smoke went straight up then spread out horizontally as if it had reached an invisible ceiling.
'The mist was clearer around the canal – just a low bed of it above the channel – but the landscape, the glimpses of dead water, the frosted grass, the bare trees, looked bleaker and colder than by the grebe pool. But Gerald could feel nothing of the cold anymore.'
To the left of the bridge on the cover, you can see the last section of the canal which follows the western boundary of Worcester College. It was on this part of the canal that a friend called Lizzie used to moor her barge and it was she who told me all about what it was like to live on a narrowboat when I was researching the novel.
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