¦ dialling in from the sky bunker ¦
08:03 Thursday morning 14th June. Smudges of baby blue are seeping through a white sky... we've had the promise of heavy rain from the weatherman but so far it's shaping up into a nice day. It's certainly started on an amazing footing.
The best book I never read. Jump back to 2002. I'm travelling around the US. Sonja had given me a book to read during my travels. A tale of reincarnation spanning five centuries. Really well written, I was loving it when, one afternoon in New York, I left it behind in a cinema and by time I had realised and run back to fetch it...it was gone.
Worse still, I could not for the life of me remember who wrote it?! Neither could Sonja. I thought it was called "To Dream No More". And so, for years afterwards I regularly stopped in 2nd hand book stalls and browsed for the best book I never read. I checked with the major booksellers: nothing. I browsed the Internet: nothing. And so I realised that it would be down to serendipity...almost like that scene from the film with John Cusak. The book would show up one day.
Jump to now.
I was relaxing in the big green armchair, taking a break, when suddenly the name Josephine Conran popped into my mind. Josephine Conran, To Dream No More...that was it, I was sure of it!!! I searched the Net and....nothing. Nooooooo. Bugger shit damn.
On a whim I changed the title to "To Sleep No More".
One search result, for somebody called James Conran.... and something to do with dark fiction. I clicked on the link. Error. The link took me to a dead site. But....wait, click back to the google search result. Dinah Lampitt. To Sleep No More.
To Sleep No More by Dinah Lampitt
That is it!!!!
I'll buy it, and maybe I find that it was never as good as I recalled, but I'm totally stoked that something I've been searching for has come round for me.
Djr