I am releasing my latest novel fiction Turkeys not Bees.

The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control. 

Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.

The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist. 

At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.

Reviewed by

David P Jones

August 12^th 2022