A man in prison for an appalling crime picks up the journal of a shell-shocked soldier and begins his own confession...So little natural light falls into my cell, and I have such a limited view from my window, that at times I feel as though I am entombed within a coffin...Down here, deep within the soil, I must content myself with mental excursions only, tripping beneath the canopies of forests that exist solely in the mind...In the end there is only my voice A prisoner is on remand in Durham high security jail for what turns out to be a series of attacks on young girls across Leicestershire, culminating in abduction, rape and murder. In the autumn of 1922, Captain Crowe is on a journey across Leicestershire. He intends to visit his old comrades from the War, finish his book on horticulture, and come to terms with a past that still haunts him and a future that terrifies him. The prisoner is reading a copy of Crowe's book, Perambulations of a Soldier: Autumn to Winter, whilst writing his own diary. Crowe's retelling of his odyssey in his letters, their subsequent appearance within Perambulations and the prisoner's interpretation of them, creates a macabre fusion of past and present, where fact and fiction, truth and reality begin to merge and coalesce...Juxtaposing the experiences of a shellshock victim in the early 1920s with the recollections of an alleged child-murderer in the present day, Journeys in the Dead Season is a masterpiece of psychological complexity and subtlety. In turns shocking and deeply moving, it is the debut of an important and compelling new literary voice.

Author Biography

Spencer Jordan has worked as a software engineer and more recently as a lecturer at the University of Wales. This is his first novel.