The Persians are Coming
The Persians are Coming: & Other Stories; Including 'Movie Star' and 'The Black Violinist'
Love, cruelty and controversy bind this lively, absorbing collection of stories together in which the author takes his cue from English history and from his own experience and imagination.
Whether it be a youth in ancient time who might have been Christ, a beggar lad in the court of King Henry the Eighth, a person of colour presented to a mad King George, a hungry East End boy in the 1930s or a successful but love-sick businesswoman in 2013, his imagination enjoys free rein. London and East Kent provide the backgrounds, the English Channel home to an illegally-moored Iranian battleship.
Observing an open-minded attitude to sex and sexuality, imaginary characters surface who dare to challenge the established order of things – notably the majority’s self-satisfied assumption of what is normal.
ISBN: 9781852001612
Size: 217x140mm
Binding: hardback
Length: 97pp
About the author:
John Groves
Born in London’s East End in 1926, and later a survivor of the wartime Blitz there, the author joined the United Kingdom Post Office at the age of fourteen.
Serving nearly four years in the Grenadier Guards, he returned to civilian life and progressed through various Departments of Government, specialising in information services, publicity and the media.
After a short sabbatical, working and studying in Hollywood, USA, he returned to the Post Office, long recognised as a qualified PR specialist in films and broadcasting. Liaising with virtually every news and documentary programme on the air, from Blue Peter to Panorama, he also became, in the late 1960s and early 70s, Government media spokesman on national broadcasting policy, much involved in the great new innovations of colour television, Channel Four, Radio One and local radio. He trained top Post Office management in interviewing skills, between-whiles helping to launch National Girobank, the new concept of postcodes, and working on the separation of BT from the parent company. Accelerated promotion to Deputy Director of Public Relations for the entire United Kingdom Post Office, then arguably the largest business in Britain, rounded off 40 years in public service. His career continued as a professional PR consultant and City correspondent.
His first novel, The Carapace, appeared in 1991, followed by Naked Heaven, Naked Earth, a controversial book of prose and poetry on a theme of environmental philosophy. His first paperback was an anthology, Poetry on Purpose, which appeared in 1994, paving the way, in 1996, for The Chocolate Sword, an anthology of seventy new poems, published in his 70th year. The Learning Curve of Love, 100 new poems for the Millennium, completed the cycle in 1999.
The MCC at Lord’s gave special prominence to his work in their first anthology of cricket verse, published by Methuen in 2004.
