About me: The PSYCHOTHERAPIST and the PROSTITUTE... strange bedfellows? They have more in common than you might think: both charge by the hour for the kind of intimate service most of us seek for free within a personal relationship, and both conceal much of their personal selves behind their professional personas and strict rules of engagement. PATRICK CHIME, a disenchanted forty-something, is a talented therapist but a terrible husband, and when a gun-toting former client and social misfit, obsessed by porn and the artist Degas, walks into his office, Patrick's own world starts to unravel and he's forced to confront his personal demons. LISTENING IN allows you, the reader, to eavesdrop on what one of Patrick's more challenging clients refers to as, those private pockets of one-sided intimacy. And, like Patrick, you might end up not only pondering the true cost of therapy, but that of a life spent listening in.
AUTHOR, Kevin Chandler, is a writer and therapist in private practice, and for more than 20 years, a trainer of Relate counsellors.
LISTENING IN: A Novel of Therapy and Real Life, was published on 6th April, 2009, available from all good bookshops, and can be ordered online via Amazon, Waterstones, and the publisher, Accent Press.
My new novel, 'Scars Beneath The Skin' is out now, available on Amazon and all other usual online outlets.
Inspired by the author's experience in the 1996 Manchester IRA bomb, it's a dark urban story about the traumatised victim of a terrorist outrage (Karl Dresner, an East Berliner) and a fiery Italian woman, Lucia Cavallieri, who wants to turn his life around.
More info at www.ajduggan.co.uk including excerpts and a BBC radio interview. Latest news is that the publisher, Flambard Press, is putting the novel forward for the Costa Book Awards and the Le Prince Maurice Prize
