Please note the double-ended upside-down opening for this book is available in books ordered in hard copy from UK booksellers only.
337 follows the life of Samuel Darte whose mother vanished when he was in his teens. It was his brother, Tom who found her wedding ring on the kitchen table along with the note.
While their father pays the price of his mother’s disappearance, Sam learns that his long-estranged Gramma is living out her last days in a nursing home nearby.
Keen to learn about what really happened that day and realising the importance of how little time there is, he visits her to finally get the truth.
Soon it’ll be too late and the family secrets will be lost forever. Reduced to ashes. But in a story like this, nothing is as it seems.
I'm delighted to be able to share an excerpt from 337 with you today...
“I
suggest you do,” he says in a voice which suggests there may be ramifications
if I choose not to.
My
only remaining thread of control is severed when he hangs up the phone. I take
a deep breath and wait for him to call back, which is something he does when he
feels he may not have made his point as clearly as he might. I lay there
staring at the dust that has collected in the corners of my phone. The screen
stays black, and after a minute or two passes I feel safe again. I place the
phone on the duvet and turn my face into the darkness of the pillow.
For
a moment I am gripped by anger, a feeling that twists in my chest like a coiled
rope. I have spent a good part of the last ten years trying to remove this
feeling from my life. I have been told on a number of occasions that if I
cannot leave it behind, it will eventually consume me. I’ll be tossed into the
black hole of its throat like Jonah and his whale. Gobbled up in one. My final
resting place will be the belly of the giant beast and, unlike Jonah, I’ll
never be seen again.
The
last person who told me this was Sara. In fact, she told me plenty of times
that I needed to change aspects of myself. For some time I listened to her,
convinced that my macabre back story was reason enough to be the person I’ve
become. It was only latterly, when I had an awakening, that I realised that her
criticisms of me were actually a product of her own insecurities. Her
insecurities moulding me into an angry and self-pitying person. A person I never
used to be, nor ever wanted to be. And so, over the last year or so, the words
I had listened to so attentively were rubberised and deflected, unheard, back
to where they came from.
And
of course, as I am sure you can now guess, Sara is gone.
And
I feel the real me returning.
Slowly.
Author Bio
M Jonathan Lee is a nationally shortlisted author and mental health campaigner. His first novel The Radio was nationally shortlisted in the Novel Prize 2012. Since that time he has gone on to publish five further novels with ‘337’ being his sixth novel. Jonathan is a tireless campaigner for mental health awareness and writes his own column regularly for the Huffington Post. He has recently written for the Big Issue and spoken at length about his own personal struggle in the British national press on the BBC and Radio Talk Europe.
Endlessly fascinated by the human condition and what leads people to do the things they do to one another, Jonathan is obsessed with writing stories with twists where nothing is exactly how it first appears.
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