There’s a creative spirit in the Royal Coast community that may surface through art, photography, music, the culinary arts and more. In this article we feature John Wigglesworth, a very creative writer.
John is a British national who needs to spend a significant part of his time in Bangkok where he runs a market research agency and recruitment company, but home in Hua Hin is where his creativity as the author of fiction novels comes to the fore.
‘The Margins’ is his debut as a published fiction author, but he has previously been the writer of a monthly opinion column on the Asian region for Research Live, a global news website for the research industry. He has also been a contributing author in the Marketing Anthology Thailand 2020—his piece ‘Juicing the Big Mango’ explored inhibitors to creativity in Thai culture.
A former backpacking junkie, John has travelled extensively across India and South East Asia, a background that was the genesis of ‘The Margins’ storyline of communal idealism in the 1980’s gone wrong. John says the book could be seen as a critique of capitalism and greed with the somewhat ambiguous title providing that hint.
As every aspiring author will recognise, achieving the acceptance of a major publishing house, in the case Penguin Random House SEA, is a long frustrating process.
In John’s case, the idea behind his novel surfaced some 20 years ago, but with other priorities in his life, remained dormant until being revived three ago. Next came multiple rejections and demands for rewrites and more frustration with a Covid-related delay in publication.
It may be true to say that the worldwide lockdown periods presented an ideal opportunity to spend time with a good book, but the closure of airport bookshops proved to be a publishing disincentive.
‘The Margins’ was published in December 2020 and can now be found (or ordered) at Asia book stores. A follow-up novel, ‘The Reading’, which John says presents a very different perspective on life, is expected to soon follow.
The link to Asia Books is www.asiabooks.com/margins-the-260935.
The following synopsis of ‘The Margins’ and ‘The Reading’ can be found at https://johnwigglesworth.webnode.com
THE MARGINS
They wanted to escape capitalism; instead they created the perfect business…
It’s a tragedy that will make headlines across the globe–the bodies of scores of Westerners discovered at a remote commune, high in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh. The Indian authorities are desperate for answers, and only Ethan Hicks can provide them–for no one else made it out alive.
And what he tells investigators will prove as shocking as the injuries he survived: of a remote commune that grew beyond recognition through a simple quirk of fate. Of a harmonious society that became riven by greed. Of a paradise that was slowly defiled by its own inhabitants.
Yet there was a series of disturbing events in the final months of the commune of which Ethan cannot speak. For to do so would lay bare the very darkest parts of the human soul–of what a man will do for money, what he’ll do for profit. Of what a man will do in the pursuit of ever-greater margins.
THE READING (unpublished)
Ten-year-old Maisie Graves’ life is falling apart. Her father is on yet another tour of duty in Vietnam, and the family’s cotton mills are close to bankruptcy, driving her emotionally distant mother deeper into alcoholism. So when Maisie finds a small wooden box, containing a rare silver half-dollar, in the creek near her home, it seems her luck might change-for a local numismatist informs her the coin is worth a small fortune.
Yet soon after the half-dollar comes into Maisie’s possession, her father’s plane is shot down over Vietnam, and a worsening liver condition hospitalizes her mother. Struggling to make sense of the continued misfortune befalling her family, Maisie begins to blame the coin for her woes. She takes the half-dollar to a local pharmacist known to have a keen interest in the occult-to her horror, Mrs Dupriest determines not only that the coin is possessed of a powerful hex, but that Maisie, too, is cursed.
As torrential rainstorms swell the Alabama River, threatening to flood the family home, Maisie becomes increasingly convinced that Mrs Dupriest’s reading was correct. In her desperate search for a way to rid herself of the purported curse, she will uncover disturbing truths about her family’s past, and a dark secret that her mother has been hiding for many years. Yet, concealed beneath the velvet lining of the coin’s box, a far more troubling revelation awaits her.
2021 Penguin Random House SEA
