Shefford author pens historical and political thriller
The novel is inspired by events surrounding the rise of Idi Amin
A Shefford author has penned a historical and political thriller that "revisits Idi Amin's forgotten Uganda".
Erik Gorter, 61, is launching The Stillness Before Dawn in Hitchin Town Hall Museum on October 31 from 5.30pm.
The novel was inspired by real events surrounding the rise of Idi Amin - a dictator and former president of Uganda - and the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community in 1972.
Erik told the Chronicle: "The story begins in 1965 on a train leaving Calcutta, where two young men, Pradeep 'Paddy' and Charlie, strike up a friendship sustained for decades by letters.
"Paddy goes on to inherit a vast estate in Uganda, but when Amin expels the country’s Asians, Paddy refuses to leave, and he and his family disappear.
"Fifty years later, Max, a journalist recovering from a brain injury, meets Charlie - now in his late seventies - in Yorkshire.
“Their search takes them to Uganda, and to the question Charlie has avoided for half a century: why the letters stopped.”
In real life, the man at the writing desk is a retired humanitarian worker, whose novel was inspired by a career with the United Nations and several NGOs.
Erik's job took him to South Sudan, so he "knew the city, the roads and the feel of the place" - whilst other research came from reading and from talking to people who lived through 1972
.Recalling the starting points for his characters, Erik said: "A friend told me how his father came to England in the 1950s.
"He travelled across India by train and met another boy of about his age. They became friends on the three-day journey and stayed pen pals for the rest of their lives.
"I thought it was the perfect opening for a novel. My friend’s father, also called Charlie, became the loose starting point for Charlie in the book."
Meanwhile, Paddy isn’t based on a real person - but his name is.
"I had a friend called Pradeep who died a few years ago, far too young," explained Erik. "The character is my way of keeping his name around."
Max is entirely invented. He’s a journalist, and journalists are professionally nosy, which is very convenient when you need someone to dig up a 50-year-old secret.
"The first draft of Erik's novel took him about eight months to write, while the editing took longer.
The author describes his style as 'write fast and fix later' - "because if I stop to polish every sentence, the story stops moving".
Erik concluded: "I was about eight when Idi Amin was in the headlines. I knew he was a brutal dictator, but I never realised just how brutal he was.
"What struck me most was how often the same pattern repeats: a government decides that a group of its own people don’t belong, and everyone else looks away."
The Stillness Before Dawn, published by Huge Jam, will be available on Amazon (paperback and Kindle) and at any bookshop.