The Smile of the Tiger

Sheena (Paka Mdogo, the clever and cheeky little black-and-white cat) has had amazing adventures in Africa.

Now, however, she finds herself trapped, alone, high up in an apartment block in Thailand, The Land of Smiles. She must escape…

…but she escapes into a very much changed Thailand, a World of Water.

She learns that smiles, like water - and animals and people - can be of very different kinds; and she has to make some extraordinary friends (including Khemkhaeng, a splendid tiger, and Chang, an unhappy young elephant - both of whom need help) and journey with them to the Tenasserim Hills in the hope of finding what they are all looking for...

Freedom.

H.S. Toshack has lived and worked as an English teacher and educational consultant in the UK, the Caribbean, East Africa, Thailand and the Middle East. 
  
His first three Paka Mdogo animal adventure stories are set in Africa, but are coloured by his experience of people, animals and lives lived in all of those other places; and in his fourth book, The Smile of the Tiger, he takes his cat heroine Sheena to Thailand. 
 
'Or rather', he says, 'I've let her take me. She led me through all four books, as if she was telling her stories through me. That's why I've added her portrait on Amazon - she was my co-author.' 
  
Second editions of the African books and a first edition of The Smile of the Tiger are now available on Amazon. 
 
He is also the principal author of The WordSmith Guides and The WordSmith Prompts, designed to help senior secondary students prepare for literature exams across a range of assessment systems. The Guides include critical commentaries on Shakespeare's major tragedies and two handbooks providing extensive courses in the rhetorical analysis of both literary and non-literary writing. 
 
Some of his travelling is reflected in several collections of poetry (illustrated by photographs 'of varying quality' - his admission!), the first of which is now available on Amazon, and by Writing Travel Poetry, which encourages travellers to record their experiences not just in photographs but also in poems. 
 
He has also produced (with Mrs. Orwell's permission) a dramatised version of Animal Farm, for use in schools. 'That was largely a matter of cutting and pasting,' he says, 'but it's become an increasingly important story to be told by whatever means in these troubled times.'  
 
'Which kind of writing brings you most satisfaction?' we asked this versatile author. 

'The kind that tries to open young and not so young minds to new ways of thinking - about life as well as literature. But I guess that's all four.'