Introduction
BTW- Beyond The Wastelands is my first full-length novel, based on a short story I wrote in 2013 called The People’s Republic of Nowhere. I wrote it at a time in my life when I was dealing with a lot of my own issues surrounding my early life and the relationship I had with my family.
Did I grow up in a totalitarian dictatorship where laughter is a crime? No, not exactly. But like a lot of LGBTQ+ children I did grow up in a family where I was despised or fatally misunderstood for my ‘difference’. By the age of sixteen, the violence and emotional conflict in my home reached critical levels and I fled for my life.
Run, hide, live became the motto of survival by which I lived my life for many years as I wandered the earth looking for a place and a people to call home. Like me, the characters in my books are queer people determined to survive against all odds.
BTW- Beyond The Wastelands is a post-apocalyptic gay-thriller-romance set in dystopian England one hundred years after Brexit. Climate change and a hostile relationship with their neighbours have left the country isolated, paranoid, and obsessed with their own illusions of genetic purity.
Foolishly 052086612SL3 falls in love with the Special Investigator tasked with destroying his family and his only choice is to leave behind his home and everything he has ever known to break out across the Wastelands and start a new life on the Otherside.
Of course, I hope you like my book, and that it entertains you, but more importantly, I hope it inspires you to find the people capable of loving you for your true self.
