As promised, the final AUTUMN short story has been added to www.lastoftheliving.net. This one was always a bit of an outlier – although it’s part of THE LONDON TRILOGY, it’s actually set in a corner of my home town, Birmingham, and it’s largely characterless until the last section. We humans are pretty good at overestimating our own importance, and BARELY A SOUND was written as a response to that. We’re too quick to forget, I think, that we’re just lodgers on this beautiful planet, and that our lease will inevitably run out sooner or later (probably sooner, the way we’re going).
BARELY A SOUND is written season by season so you can work your way through the first ‘post-people’ year on Planet Earth. You need to start, appropriately enough, with AUTUMN.
I’ve said this before, but I really do think that after eight novels and a couple of collections (including more than fifty short stories), this is the end of AUTUMN. I may go back on my word in a few years time, because I do have one more idea to get out of my system, but that will be a very different novel set around thirty years after the events of the other books, and long after the last of the dead have disappeared.
The omnibus edition of AUTUMN: THE LONDON TRILOGY is now available in eBook, audio, and as a hefty hardcover. A word of warning if you’re after a print copy – stocks are limited, and once the few copies I have here are gone, it’ll likely be the end of the month before I take delivery of more. Also, I’m not going to be around for a few weeks after today, so there will be a delay in processing orders. My wife and I are going exploring – a trip to Japan that was originally booked for my 50th birthday. But then the pandemic happened, and various other things happened, and now – all being well – I’ll actually be flying home on my 53rd birthday. Time definitely speeds up as you get older…
Enjoy the stories. See you in a few weeks.
