By James L Gordon

Set mostly in Cambridge, U.K., ROCKY FOUNDATIONS charts the last year of an avant-garde rock group, and how it split dramatically when poised on the very brink of success.  Within this, it focuses on a young man rejecting a strict Catholic public school and Oxford background, for the uncertainties of an experimental rock/jazz fusion band.  

You can buy this book from Amazon.co.uk  
or Amazon.com

About ROCKY FOUNDATIONS

The second book “Many Mansions” explores the spiritual crisis that followed the split, while  books 3 and 4 (“A Dacca Surprise” and “Point Omega”) are about JG’s adventures in a real-life, if somewhat unconventional aid agency which worked in East Pakistan/Bangladesh between 1971 and 1974.

Though dead two weeks before ROCKY FOUNDATIONS begins, John’s Irish Catholic mother, with the hooded cloak she generally wore (she was actually a lay Dominican nun), is a brooding presence throughout, a major character indeed, more than once even making various forms of appearance from beyond the grave.  Another throwback to John’s earlier life is Chapter 17, a stream of consciousness portrayal of an extended pubcrawl, whose starting-point is one of Cambridge’s best-known pubs, the Eagle. (As the picture shows, it is just across the road from St Bene’t’s church, another Cambridge landmark in its own right, which also features in John’s fevered imaginings on the evening concerned.)  

The chapter is a tribute to James Joyce, by whom it is strongly and deliberately influenced.  
It is the ever-present clash between John’s determination to be a fully functioning child of the sixties, and his awareness of a class-ridden and obscurantist past from

which he would fain escape,  that gives the book its tension and not a little of

its humour.

Cover design by Desmond Avery

© J L Gordon 2009

CLICK TO READ ABOUT THE May 28th LAUNCH