M’TK Sewer Rat, End of Empire Book One is difficult to place in a genre for me, but I think that it is a fantasy written in the first person in the style of a narrative or autobiography. The main protagonist and narrator, Jake Jaconovich, is about four- years old when we meet him. He is living with his working-class parents in a highly polluted city in the north, which his rather decides to evacuate them from in favour of a fishing village where his wife comes from. However, after a period of relative bliss, Mr Jaconovich decides that he will have to move back to a city if he is going to earn a decent wage. Not only that, but he gets sea sick!
They return to a new life of drudgery, but the three of them stick together, work hard and eventually pick themselves up to a reasonable standard of living, even though the city is infested with rats, drunks and other forms of low life.
The family’s big break comes when Jake senior gets a job on the rail road and one night saves many hapless inhabitants from a marauding army. The rail road owner notices him and he is made manager. After many trials and tribulations, little Jake heads off to university and seeks his own life and family, although his own parents are never far out of the picture.
M’TK Sewer Rat, End of Empire, Book 1, ends when Jake junior is in his mid twenties by my calculation, but Miss McCann has packed a lot of action into those twenty years.
M’TK Sewer Rat is a heart-warming story of poor boy made good through honesty, hard work, and the support of a loving family. Miss McCann has taken on a huge task by tackling this type of subject and she does a good job of it. It is inspirational.
The text has been well, but not perfectly edited, although that does not detract from reading the novel and the title and cover are apt for the story.
Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis; in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup; and while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail from Barry to Gibraltar a home-made concrete yacht, which was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker and an American aircraft carrier.
“I am a Celt, and we are romantic”, he said when asked about his writing style, “and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really”. He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of fifteen years.
His first novel, Daddy's Hobby is from the seven-part series 'Behind The Smile: The Story of Lek, a Bar Girl in Pattaya', but his largest collection is 'The Megan Series', twenty-three novelettes on the psychic development of a teenage girl, the subtitle of which, 'A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!' sums them up nicely. He has written fifty novels and novelettes, including: Dead Centre; Andropov's Cuckoo; Fate Twister; The Disallowed (a philosophical comedy); Tiger Lily of Bangkok; and A Night in Annwn (Annwn being the ancient Welsh word for Heaven). Many have been translated into foreign languages and narrated into audio books.
Owen Jones writes stories set in Wales, Spain and Thailand, where he now lives. He is a life-long Spiritualist, and this belief is interwoven, in a very realistic way, into many of his books and storylines. If you like a touch of the 'supernatural', try his books
He sums his life up thus: “Born in the Land of Song, Living in the Land of Smiles”.
