The Fakir of Florence

I have just had a new book published by Winter Oak Press – and this time it’s a novel.

The Fakir of Florence is subtitled “A Novel in Three Layers”, for reasons which are self-explanatory!

The first layer of narration is a contemporary one – the first-hand account of a writer called Paul who is spending a month in Florence, Italy, and looking for inspiration.

The second concerns a book he discovers and decides to translate into English. This tells the story of a wandering mystic who turned up in Florence during the Renaissance and preached an anarchic form of metaphysics during the time of the Neoplatonist revival.

The third layer consists of the stories told by this character, il fachiro di Firenze – these are philosophical tales set in an invented bygone age.

The three layers are not completely separate of course, not least because they form part of the same novel.

And the layers of narration furthest from the world we know are not necessarily the most remote from reality, in the same way that ideas buried deep within the fantasy of fiction are no less valid than those set out plainly on the rational surface of a political essay.

To quote a character from my own  novel: “Fiction, if fashioned from the raw material of authenticity, can turn out to be truer than fact”.

There’s lots of info on the Winter Oak website.