In September 2013 Cathy and I did our second road trip to Namibia, once more including a visit to the main view site of the Fish River Canyon, the second biggest canyon in the world. On that occasion we stayed at the Canyon Roadhouse, the interior of which provided the photograph that was used for…
Author: justinw
Bushman’s Nek has a special relevance for my wife and I. We went there initially to do research for my book For the Love of Frances, the skirmish at the top of Bushman’s Nek Pass between the escaping AmaHlubi people and the small expeditionary forces led by Anthony Durnford the purpose of the visit. Since then we…
My latest book, Others Will Have Their Say is going through the final stages before publication. The picture above is a candidate for the cover if the book is self-published. It was taken at Madisa Camp, Namibia, one of the locations in the novel. What follows is the Preface, Chapter One and a part of…
We thought the first Covid 19 wave was over. We thought we might be lucky in South Africa, that if anything was to threaten our lives or our economy it might only come with winter in the middle of 2021. We were wrong. It has come again with a new strain, ironically during the season…
THE MAP CHAPTER ONE
During the lock-down I had great fun doing three photo albums. The one with this cover paired thirteen of my poems, most written in late 2007 and early 2008, with photographs taken on a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II from Cape Town to Southampton. Featured below is a page from this album, with a…
Jo Petzer of Cosmic Creations is clearly not satisfied with doing the conventional when it comes to turning a photograph into a book cover. For my new novel, Nowhere Man I gave her two photographs to choose from, both taken in Namibia, both of a man walking alone, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. The one was…
Hi Peter, I really enjoyed Motor Games – such a human story and a story too, of humanity. I’m always interested in the working of businesses other than the one I spent my life in – primarily mining and minerals. As a fairly normal male I’ve also always been interested in motor vehicles. And my understanding is…
On our recent trip to northern Europe we had a five day introduction to Norway. It included a ride on the renowned Flamm railway and a trip in a high speed ferry down the Sognefjord – the longest and deepest fjord in Norway – to Bergen. The ferry ride was broken in the small town…
A motor journey through four Southern African countries.
Carte Blanche in early February had an expose of the crooked side of publishing in South Africa; promises being made to aspiring authors to have their books published and promoted for over R20 000. I felt for them, with their dreams being dashed after parting with a substantial amount of money. It brings me to…
How an image captured in a desert restaurant found its way to the cover of my new novel, Motor Games. The photograph was taken at seven thirty on the evening of September 16, 2013 in the restaurant of the Canyon Roadhouse near the Fish River Canyon in southern Namibia. The camera was a Nikon D7000…
I am not one to take photographs of groups of people. Faces are a different matter – the gateway to the soul. I first discovered how rewarding this subject can be when my wife and I were doing research for Death on the Kunene and we visited Himba villages in the Sesfontein and Epupa areas.…
After the visit to Petra we stayed in a Bedouin camp called Bait Ali, in the Wadi Rum area. We arrived after dark, perhaps fortunately for nothing was as it had been on their website. Amongst the issues were two shower stalls in the men’s ablutions to accommodate a camp of over 50 tents. The…
Our journey started in Eilat, the Israeli city on the Red Sea. We crossed the border into the twin city of Aqaba, the port city of Jordan, then took the double carriage highway north towards the capital Amman. The road rises through barren mountains to a plateau, with desert vistas and isolated mountains, then west…
I was having trouble finding a photograph to use for the cover of the e-book version of A Family Affair. Eventually I found this image taken with my first Nikon in July 2005. We were on a family holiday to Zanzibar, staying on the northern tip of the island. Compare it to the enhanced version…
ADAM GEARD IS BACK. There are two stories to tell. The first is for marketing buffs. In all my career as a marketing man in the motor industry there was never a story to rival this. I started writing Kill for the Land on January 17 and it was accepted by Lulu.com, available for purchase…
There’s a new Adam Geard book coming. It’s set in the Eastern Cape, in the small town of Pearston, at the foot of the Sneeuberg Mountains. A photograph was needed for the cover and I found the image on a stock farm outside Cradock last December: a mountain – also part of the Sneeuberg –…
It took fourteen months of writing and over six hundred hours of research to produce, and it is nearly here. On the Warm Shores of Africa, the sequel to A Family Affair, is at the printers and will become available for sale shortly. The cover follows the new-look branding being applied to the books for e-publication, and…
Which of these images would you choose for the cover of my new book, “On the Warm Shores of Africa”? Please use the comment form below to give me your choice. The book will be published in January, 2018. It continues the lives of the Allison family first encountered in “A Family Affair”, dealing with…