Indoldrum – Out Now! – Arthur Hofn

My new novel.

My new novel Indoldrum is now out! After a long period of writing, redrafting, editing and proofing I realised I was at the point where I could unleash it on the world. It’s available on Amazon and for the weekend of 8th and 9th August 2020 the e-book will be free of charge. Just follow the links on this page to the Amazon webpage and download it. – It is also available as a paperback.

Johann might be lost, he isn’t sure. Battling Ménière’s disease and severe hearing loss is hard. Some of the strange new people in his life make him feel uneasy and he’s not sure why. Where have these people come from? What do they know about him? And is there something wrong with time itself? His in-laws have lost their cat, it’s an event which triggers unforeseen challenges and raises questions he’s just not ready to deal with. Johann loves his wife Harriet, she’d help him; but Harriet is dead and the world has ended in more than one way.

This is the first time I have written in the first person and it was an interesting challenge that I really enjoyed. The novel follows the character of Johann and his wife Harriet. However when we meet Johann he is a widower and the loss of his wife is something that he is struggling to deal with. It’s harder because he also suffers from Ménière’s disease, an issue which affects the balance centre of the inner ear causing severe dizzy spells that can last for hours as well as hearing loss. I decided to write about this as a few years ago I was diagnosed with it.

However there is more going on than that. I don’t want to give away too much but there is something wrong with Johann’s world, the laws of physics aren’t quite making sense. There’s a few mysteries to be solved including a person who appears in Johann’s life who will… well I won’t say too much, but who exactly is he? Why is he acting so strange?

Mainly though the novel is about loss. Harriet’s illness and then death casts a large shadow over everything that happens to Johann. That’s not to say it’s all sad, he tells of the happy times of marriage and the reasons for the love of his wife and his adoptive family of in-laws.

And so the evening followed. I’d been taken pity on for having no friends at the wedding even though I actually did have friends in my normal life. We did chat and her friends were nice and then I was dragged to the dance floor and made to humiliate myself to music I never listen to and I so wanted the evening to last forever and I so wanted to go home and hide forever.
We exchanged numbers and I decided that the best thing to do was to change my number the next day. Of course as an over-reaction it might give me away and I realised that as there was little danger of her actually calling me I shouldn’t worry so much. Until she called me.

I made it back to the table with two double whiskies and several packets of crisps. In all the excitement we’d not had anything to eat since a break in the music when we’d gorged ourselves on beef burgers.
‘So do you want kids?’ Andrew had finished his pint.
‘Yes.’
‘And…’
‘And an Aston Martin. Overall it’s cheaper than children but Harriet won’t let me have one.’

Sally and Felix were there and I felt it was nice as they weren’t family or work colleagues or whatever, instead they were people who only had ever seen Harriet and myself as one unit. We were the couple next door, not Harriet and the one she’d married or their old manager’s husband or even their colleague’s wife. Their being there represented the death of our marriage, not just the death of one person and I needed that.
As always Sally was wonderful, she understood I needed people to feel what I was feeling so she openly wept, sharing the grief, and I felt better for it.
After we had tea and cake at a village hall overlooking green fields and then it was over. My life, forever changed, was moving on. This my past was now my past and my future waited unknown and unwanted.

It’s deliberately written out of chronological order but it is written in an order which slowly reveals what is going on. This was something I realised I could do by writing in the first person.

I’m very happy with this, my third full novel, and I hope you will enjoy reading it. And remember it’s free on the 8th and 9th of August.

Buy Indoldrum by Arthur Hofn