The Lost Boy, the Doodlebug and the Mysterious Number 80

Book excerpt: This is an eclectic and thought-provoking book, best defined as a modern day fairy tale in which the dreams and lives of four people are inexorably linked together across time, bound by love, friendship, heartache and fateDuring the London Blitz a young woman, Iris, has a vision while reading Tarot cards of two lovers in great peril and knows it will be her destiny to help them. Meanwhile Robert, a wounded and repressed Battle of Britain pilot, dreams of happiness and of a love he believes he can never have.In another time, Charlie, a troubled little boy with amazing blue-green eyes growing up in the repressed suburbs of 1950s South London, dreams of the number ‘80’ and knows only that it means something terrible and evil. Elsewhere, a dark, disturbed man dreams repeatedly of Charlie and knows it is his destiny to kill him.This time-travelling tale moves between present day Dulwich, World War Two London, the gay bars of the 1970s, Eva Peron’s Buenos Aires and Glastonbury Tor in 1989. It is a tale of great love and loss, destiny, tragedy, spiritual transformation and self-acceptance. It asks questions about how much of our lives are destined and how much can be altered and about what the effects of unintentional time travel would be on very ordinary people. This book can be interpreted on many different levels. On one it is a murder-mystery, on another an allegorical tale of spiritual transformation, on a third, a complex tale of two gay men’s individual journeys into adulthood and on a fourth, a simple and beautiful love story.