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Meet the author

James Ward was born in Middlesbrough in 1961. He has a BA in Biblical Studies from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and an MA and a DPhil  (both in Philosophy) from Sussex University. His doctoral thesis explored the interrelation of Karl Marx and Max Stirner. He has worked as a teacher for forty years, and been married for forty-three. He is the author of everything in the Cool Millennium Books catalogue.

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“All of my books try to explore the big questions of life. My first novel, The Weird Problem of Good, began as a sub-plot within a novel called The Ganges, Cleveland - which, in the end, I couldn’t get to work. Perhaps the tone was off: the protagonists in The Ganges were children, but it was supposed to be a book for adults. Or perhaps it was too ambitious. In any case, its sub-plot became the finished product, and while that finished product is light-hearted, it does examine serious issues, in particular, prejudice and multiculturalism.

“My next book – The House of Charles Swinter – is a blockbuster of some 160,000 words. I re-wrote it three times, but I’m happy with the end result. It’s a love story, with one eye on what old age means in a secularised world and how far it’s appropriate to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Eighty-year-old Charles Swinter has a chiefly harmful effect on those around him, yet there’s a strong sense in which he’s heroic. And, despite the novel’s title, he’s not its main character. This is a love story, and centre-stage belongs to two young people. Enough said.

 

“My final attempt at romance was The Bright Fish, which examines the prospects for love in a speculative universe where time and eternity occupy the foreground. Two twenty-year-olds on a luxury cruise find the laws of the universe subtly altered, and they have to make choices about how important their love for each other is. I won’t be giving anything away if I reveal that their answer is: it trumps everything.

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“The Tales of MI7 series consists of eighteen novels and over a million words. I’d long wanted to write a ‘state of the nation’ novel, and espionage fiction seemed a good way to do that. Firstly, spies are by nature intimately connected to the major political concerns of the day, so I could write about those; secondly, they all face dilemmas about how to reconcile their professional and personal lives – dilemmas all of us face in one way or another, but which, for spies, are probably particularly acute. Then there’s the question of what spies are supposedly trying to protect: the ‘British way of life’ in MI7’s case. Which is what? And supposed to be what? And finally, of course, there are the obvious moral problems: how far is the British, or any, way of life worth defending? Where do you draw the line in coming to its rescue? Who are the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’ guys, and who decides? What are the ethics of spying? Ever?

Hannah and Soraya’s Fully Magic Generation-Y *Snowflake* Road Trip across America is a spin-off from the Tales of MI7 series, but it’s not necessary to have read any of the books in that series to make sense of it. It’s about four women, and features very few men. It’s as light-hearted as The Weird Problem of Good. A beach read, maybe.

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“As well as all that, I’ve written a collection of short stories, two collections of ghost stories, two philosophical works, and two books of poetry. I probably will publish one more book in my life: it’s in progress, but I’m in no hurry. It will be called ‘Prospects for a Utopia’, or something like that, and it will begin with a critique of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, which I’m now convinced is missing something crucial. I won’t say more than that, because I want to remain open to revising my views.

“Recently, I’ve built up a small following on TikTok (and a much smaller one on YouTube). I was motivated by seeing what other ‘BookTok’ creators were producing - which, from what I could tell, was videos in praise of Colleen Hoover, or of Fantasy literature, and carousels of book covers behind text like, ‘Novels I’d give my right arm to read again for the first time.’ I thought I could do better. Yes, I’m old, and not very easy to look at, and my voice is awful; but I don’t have any other face or voice, and if I didn’t do it, who would? A shave, an ironed shirt with a tie, and subtitles, might just enable me to get away with it. Which it has. So far.”

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