Just completed editing TRUBLE, an adventure/fantasy novel for teenagers and uploaded it to Amazon KDP – £5.99 paperback and £1.99 ebook. I’m also submitting it to agents and would like to believe they see commercial possibilities. To me, of course, it’s the best novel I’ve written.
The main character, Jacob, is based on a kid I worked with as a teacher for Gateshead Home Tuition Service and who, like many others, had been excluded for a string of offences. Many of the other students and staff in the book are also based on real people.
Sixteen-year-old Jacob Lee Manning seems like a hopeless case to home tutor Andy Fish. Excluded from school for drug dealing, attacks on staff and pupils, vandalism, etc, and finally bringing down a suspended ceiling and hospitalizing himself and other pupils, Jacob is also severely dyslexic and suffering from ADHD. However, Andy discovers the boy has a rare gift for technology but is alarmed by his ability to levitate objects among other subversive talents.
Such stunts, and other even more spectacular ones, have been made possible by a miraculous phone – nicknamed the Enzee – acquired by one of Jacob’s thieving friends. Unfortunately, many powerful people including gangsters and government agents find out about the device and make violent advances to get hold of it.
Among Andy’s other students is Noraz, an unaccompanied fourteen-year-old found wandering the streets apparently suffering from amnesia and assumed to be an illegal immigrant. However, the boy is key to the mystery of the Enzee’s power – a meteorite discovered at the Antarctic by Yu Chang, a Korean scientist – though this is not revealed for some time.
Meanwhile, Jacob fights off adversaries using the Enzee’s super functions which include time travel which is used to visit 1939s New York where he meets his hero Nikola Tesla and helps realize the inventor’s great ambition to produce free energy. Returning to the present day with a scale model of Tesla’s flying saucer design, Jacob enlists the help of Yu Chang and other friends to fly to the far side of the Moon where Noraz’s parents have been staying.
Although the novel includes elements of sci-fi, it is rooted in believable situations with characters drawn from real life. There is also a subtle moral regarding the consequences of climate change if we do not act soon.
The idea for the Enzee phone came from a project devised for KS3 students to stimulate creativity and design skills. Asked to imagine a futuristic phone with any number of imagined functions, they not only had to make a prototype using available materials but consider the consequences, e.g. if their phone enabled users to fly or become invisible, for example. This novel takes that idea and runs with it.