Congratulations Jean - a published author!

Congratulations Jean. Well done!



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Has Harold Pinter collided with the Priory of Sion, in this strange tale? Or has Jean Baudrillard met his fate at the hands of Dennis Wheatley? Perhaps Paul Auster has been talking to the Third Policeman? A dazed man crosses England by night in an inscrutable luxury car. Hardly knowing who he is or where he's going, he feels he might have been awake for a thousand years. Then, at a grand and desolate mansion where he chances to call, he stumbles on a gathering of strangers, whose welcome is as effusive as it's bizarre. Decades of scholarly research, planning, and calculation have gone into this meeting which, those present are convinced, will change their lives forever - perhaps even alter the very nature of time and being. Now they are ready for the final act of their long drama. Instead they hear another story. Not of metaphysics, but of a Chinaman, a whore, and perhaps a murder in a Mediterranean marina; of an innocent girl sent on a pilgrimage to some unknown end across the blistering North African desert; of the ancient, unique Senua Codex; of artists and philosophers and savants précieuses in smoky Parisian cafés; of a desperate search for a seductress with a leather-bound notebook; and of a CIA assassin working for the KGB... At the heart of it all, and of their bizarre scheme, is the enigmatic Martin. But is he mad, blessed, or cursed? Or exactly what he says he is? Author Profile

Jean Bonnin was born in Lavaur, in the Tarn in France, in the year of the deep snows; he was brought up mainly in Wales and England. He took his first degree in government and politics at Birmingham, and his second in political philosophy at Hull; his doctoral research was on theories of despotism. After university he lived and worked in France, Portugal, Ireland, and the former East Germany. On deciding to leave the underground music scenes of Berlin and northern France behind him - but not to abandon his guitar - he returned to Wales, where he now lives with his wife and his imaginary cat.
http://www.firecrest-fiction.com/content/impossible.html

Jean's recently deceased father was a writer too - here's his obituary as it appeared in the Guardian. It's written by Jean.

Georges Bonnin

Jean Bonnin
The Guardian, Friday 2 January 2009

In 1944 my father, Georges Bonnin, who has died aged 88, was imprisoned by the Nazis in Toulouse. Each night, he fell asleep to the screams of comrades being tortured. There were regular convoys of inmates to concentration camps. One day he was informed that he was to be killed, but the next day the Nazis instead opened the gates as the Allies advanced, and waved the prisoners goodbye.

After the war Georges was an official French observing lawyer at the Nuremberg trials, and at the time of his death he was revising an autobiography, to be entitled The 14th of July at Nuremberg. After the war he moved to Whaddon Hall, in Buckinghamshire (1947-59), as an editor of the German diplomatic archives.

He then went on to become an internationally renowned historian. One of his most well-respected books, Bismarck and the Hohenzollern Candidature for the Spanish Throne (1957), combined documents and commentary to lay bare the chancellor's scheme in 1870 to substitute the exiled Queen Isabella with the German Prince Leopold. Le Putsch de Hitler à Munich en 1923 (1966) drew on transcripts of the future Führer's trial after his abortive coup, which up until that point had not been fully explored by historians.

Georges was a solicitor's son, born in the Vendée in western France and educated by Jesuits at Vannes. He took a doctorate in law from the Sorbonne. With the outbreak of war he served in the army. He was arrested during the occupation while evading forced labour.

After Whaddon Hall he studied at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and researched in Bonn, Ohio and St Antony's College, Oxford. He also worked as a fruit farmer in Lot-et-Garonne in the Dordogne and taught at Leeds University and Thames Polytechnic. He was a generous and drily amusing tutor who wore odd coloured socks - because the first two socks at the top of his drawer would be the ones he would put on. Once, by accident, he wore a matching pair - and one of his students asked whether he was feeling all right.

In the mid-1980s he retired to Wales, although for the last eight years he suffered from Parkinson's disease. At his funeral his coffin was draped in the tricolore, and the Marseillaise, La Vie en Rose and Je ne Regrette Rien were played. His last words were "let's have champagne and oysters in Arcachon".

He is survived by his wife Morfydd, myself and my wife Evelyn.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/jan/02/1