THE 3RD AGE TRILOGY follows the life journeys of Barney Roper and his wife Alice, a pair of ‘60-something’ empty nesters who determine to explore this next stage of their lives fully to see what this 3rd age has to offer.  Their journeys take them in opposite directions and into new relationships which they hadn’t foreseen. Alice stays anchored in the UK but Barney travels first to Canada, in the first book, then Asia – China, Tibet and Nepal in the second book and to Europe and Africa in the last book of the trilogy. Although they decide to divorce, they are continually thrown back together by the problems faced by their children. But they persevere with their new roles as 3rd age pioneers – breaking trail for their kids, as Barney sees it.

IN HOT PURSUIT- Book 1 – Published June 2007 – more info

THE BLUE-EYED BOY – Book 2 – Published March 2010 – more info

A SINGLE STEP – Book  3 – Published May 2011 - more info

A Novel for the ‘sixty-somethings’

IN HOT PURSUIT is my first novel about a couple of empty-nesters facing life in the 3^rd Age. Here’s a brief synopsis:

Barney Roper is a ‘sixty-something’ in search of some purpose to this third age of his life. His children have all left home and his marriage seems an empty shell. He decides to break from his wife, Alice and go back to his roots in Canada.

Alice, in her turn, determines to change direction and follow-up on her long-cherished wish to study archaeology. She plunges into her new life as a 60-year-old Oxford student and quickly becomes entangled in an unexpected relationship.

Barney, meanwhile, starts hares in all directions with some amusing and unpredictable results – his stated aim to follow TS Eliot’s dictum that ‘old men should be explorers’ takes him into the seamier sides of Vancouver.

Whatever else they expected their 3^rd age to be, it is certainly challenging and they both willingly rise to meet it. The novel deals head-on with all aspects, both funny and sad, of living fully in this undiscovered country of the ‘sixty-somethings’.

To read the first two chapters – download here

WARNING! A novel for the over 60’s only.

Barney Roper, rising 70, determines to travel to China in his search for answers to his dilemma of how to steer through this stage of his life. Despite his better judgment he persuades Roz, a painter with whom he has become infatuated, to travel with him. But Roz is a woman with a past and it finally catches up with them as they move overland from China to Tibet and Nepal and land in the middle of a political revolution.

Meantime, Barney’s wife, Alice, has been following her new-found freedom to explore her own life, post-60, in London and Rome with her new partner, Heck. They try to escape from the constraints of academia, only to find themselves embroiled in an ill-judged student protest over climate change that threatens to land him in prison and puts her in hospital.

Barney and Alice seem unable to extricate themselves from their past lives despite being half a world apart. Living fully in the 3rd Age makes heavy demands that have them clutching each other for support. But they follow Churchill’s advice: “when you’re going though hell – keep going.”

A SINGLE STEP is the last novel in THE 3RD AGE TRILOGY. In it, Barney Roper finds himself moving from his pursuit of answers in the Far East to seeking meaning closer to home as he becomes caught up in the lives of people living and working in a hospice.

But he is called away to help rescue his youngest daughter, Cassie, who goes missing in Guinea, where she works with the child amputees of the civil war devastating West Africa.

His search for her and his encounters with local people from Mauritania to Sierra Leone force him to further explore what he can do at his age with this troubling thorn of a question -how shall a man live?