'If you don't know, I don't know...'
'Things not discussed can never be recorded and therefore have never taken place.'
Those were the last words Michael Butler said to his younger son, Jeff, on a Saturday evening in August before Jeff left on holiday.
Jeff could not have imagined that events would unravel so fast from there, starting with the suicide of his father by hanging in their garage later that night and leading to a surprising trip to Hungary, where his father had been working for an international organisation and had become involved in investigating the trafficking of Roma girls into the sex trade.
As far as Jeff was concerned, the act of suicide causes such indescribable pain for those left behind that for anyone to even contemplate the act was inexcusable. An act of love betrayed. But was his father really responsible for taking his own life?
Author Jeremy Bending spent his life as a hospital doctor and consultant physician. During that time he wrote fiction and short stories, some of which were brought together in his book A Listening Doctor, published in 2018. Following a life-long passion for writing, after hanging up his stethoscope he embarked on a new career as a writer of fiction.
His first novel, In the Shadows of the Birch Trees, published in 2020, tells the story of the lives a young Hungarian woman and her baby live, following their escape from entering the Birkenau concentration camp in WW2.
If You Don't Know..., his second novel, was published in 2023, and was chosen as a finalist in the International Page Turner Writing Awards 2022. This complex thriller unravels the events surrounding the death of a diplomat, who is murdered by a Hungarian gang he uncovers trafficking Roma girls into the sex trade.
His third novel, Impulses, also published in 2023, is the intriguing story of how a man could lose control of his basic impulses. He must be ill, but what sort of affliction could lead to such a serious change in his personality?
His fourth novel, Gwendoline, 'A Story of Love and Tragedy', to be released on 30 April 2024, follows the life of a young woman through the 1900s, as she faces the trials and tribulations of leaving home to train as a nurse against her father's wishes; falling in love during the Second World War; raising a family; and suffering from severe depression in her later life, which ultimately leads to her tragic death.
