Mark Heidenstam

I was born in Grimsby, my mother's home town, but grew up in Norfolk, initially in a village with the archetypally English name of Saxlingham Nethergate, and then Norwich. The city, as the adage has it, of a pub for every day of the year, a church for every week, and a brothel for every month. Although I may have imagined the last one. And a modern version in any event would probably be prize-winning authors for January to December, given the alumni of the UEA's school of creative writing.

Following school I went into journalism in King's Lynn, with the idea of becoming a sports writer, but somehow that never took off, although I covered football very occasionally and even speedway, despite being clueless as to its finer points. It was very noisy. That I certainly understood.

Later I worked in the East Midlands, when it still had a shoe industry, with unions with great acronymic initials - Nubso, which became Nuflat. I sometimes covered drag racing at the Santa Pod strip, which I found to be even noisier than speedway. And then editing some local papers in the Bedford area.

Finally I settled down on the night news desk of the Financial Times, which might appear to be the polar opposite of sports journalism, except that football particularly seems nowadays as much about money as the game itself.

Stepping into the Sun, my first and quite possibly likely to be my only novel, was written in the mid- to late-1980s, which is why it is set then, although I heavily rewrote it a year or two back. One of its themes is the significance of European culture, and its loss, but I stoically resisted the temptation, post the Brexit referendum, to add emphasis to that aspect.

I retired from the FT after working through two Argentine peso crises, for fear of a third erupting, and decamped to Euroland. No currencies crises there...

I now have a website up and running, and anyone interested in my novel, which is now due to be published on August 28 2021, is very welcome to contact me by email:

[email protected]

The website can be found at:

https://steppingsun.com/

I will be delighted to hear from anyone with comments, good and bad! The ebook is now available, as is the book, but there apparently have been delays in the distribution of books (presumably mainly covid-related, although Brexit has also caused a shortage of drivers) so that version may take a little while to arrive.

One thing to mention is that the ebook was originally categorised as 'crime/thriller/mystery' and unfortunately was reviewed as a crime novel on Amazon. There is certainly a mystery central to the story, but it is very much not a crime novel or a thriller. Apart from being literary fiction, truthfully I am not sure what genre it fits into!

But another Amazon reviewer gave what I think is a good summary of elements of the plot and as such a sense of what to expect: ''It is a subtle study of several very different worlds and lives, ranging from the dying days of the Third Reich, to a complacent English cathedral town, to an old woman living near the Arctic circle, to a sea voyage into the Soviet Union. And a subtle study of character and insanity.''