Philip Newey: Coming Soon: Angel’s Harp

My new novel will be released on Amazon and Createspace sometime over the next week or so. I am still tinkering with a few small issues. It will be available on Smashwords at a later date, as I will be enrolling it initially in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program for a while, so that I can offer some free promotions.

It is called Angel’s Harp, and the blurb is as follows:

"The bonds in molecules vibrate too, making endless symphonies. Each molecule is a little angel's harp." Thus writes the young Alan to Beth. Beth whom he has never met, but who lived in the house next door fifteen years earlier. Alan and Melanie growing up in an Australian suburb in the 1960s/70s; Beth growing up in the same suburb in the 1940s/50s. What strange orchestration weaves their lives together? And how will the final chord be resolved?

Exploring themes from spirituality, to sexual awakening, to psychosis, the story gently leads the reader from the circumscribed world of the child, through the anguished teenage years, to the world of the adult, when everything should begin to make sense. Shouldn’t it? Follow Alan Carter as he struggles to discern the meaning and patterns of his life, while the forces that compose the music of the universe roll on relentlessly.

And here is the opening page or so:

It was an indulgence, perhaps. A scattering to the wind of money he might well have dispensed more wisely. But it had evolved into far more than a holiday. It had become a kind of pilgrimage, a journey into healing. Or so he hoped. He might almost be able to believe in something again. In what wasn’t yet clear. In humanity? In God? In himself?

He had seen all that he had hoped to see, and more. Stonehenge at dawn on the summer solstice, listening to Sonnenaufgang from Also Sprach Zarathustra. The Starry Night in Amsterdam, in the Van Gogh Museum, when by sheer chance it happened to be on loan from New York for a few months. Holbein’s dead, so very dead, Christ at the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The magnificent Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica. This and much, much more. And so it was that he arrived at last in Florence, the final leg of his trip before returning to Rome and flying from Fiumicino back to Australia. Already, that morning, he had stood in awe before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. Now, the Accademia.

He had not expected it, turning the corner. Of course he had expected to see the statue, the magnificent David, but he had not expected this. Even from this distance, before it loomed above him, before he saw the echoes of light on the smooth marble curves. Before he became aware of the oddly small penis and the too-large head. Even from back here, seeing it framed by the narrowing perspective of the gallery walls, he felt the tug, the gut-wrenching tug. An enormous hand, perhaps the statue’s own overlarge hand, had seized his sinews and begun to pluck, to pluck a melody in which beauty and pain were one. It terrified him. Each vibration killed him, brought him to life, and killed him again. Life and death were just two halves of the same oscillation.

When Alan Carter finally boarded the flight back to Australia, he was hopeful – not certain, but hopeful – that he was again in the lifeward phase of the oscillation. Except that it was no longer quite so easy to tell them apart, life and death.

The story has a sting in the tail, and I’m sure you will enjoy it.

And here is a sneak peek at the cover: