Tom Appleton

hello, i am the writer tom appleton. i live in wellington, new zealand. my novel "hessabi" was published in german and with an austrian publisher, czernin verlag in vienna. they gave it a colourful cover and called it a coming-of -age novel. i imagine "huckleberry finn" was a kind of coming-of-age novel. or maybe "catcher in the rye". if that is so, or if i'm right thinking that's the type of book that is meant by the concept of a coming-of-age novel, then "hessabi" is probably something of that sort. it is a story about a persian boy living with his parents and his brother in germany -- west germany -- during the beatle years. so the beatles play a large part in this story, and you may find that you can probably listen to all the beatle songs while reading the book. in this regard, it doesn't matter whether you read it in the usa or iran (formerly known as persia) or germany (long since reunited with east germany) --- it's a historical novel, not set in the age of shakespeare, but in the more recent past, the 1960s. I thought of it as a spy novel, a picaresque novel, a persian novel written in german, an american novel written in german --- that has yet to happen, someday somebody may publish an american translation of it. someday somebody else may also publish an iranian translation of it, but i imagine that may be someday in the distant future. i'm trying to attach a photograph here that shows me sitting in wellington one day while the rain clouds were creeping up behind me. if you happen to be living in wellington you'll see that this was the view over the harbour from the kaiwharawhara side of things. so as much as the novel may seem like a fantasy story it is real in as much as that i wrote it here in wellington, back in 2007 to 2009, and it was published in 2016, delayed by the world economic crisis. here at amazon it received one reader review, by a reviewer i neither knew nor paid for his services, but he did write a 5-star-review, so i thank him. if you are reading this biographical sketch, dear reader, know that i thought of the book as something you might enjoy reading together with a sweetheart, taking turns reading different pages or chapters to one another. you can also open the book at any page on any day, it's called doing a "fale hafes" in persian, i.e., reading it like a book by hafes. any page will do.