Bücher veröffentlicht von AESOP Publications

John Fraser latest novel is about Life: - mysteries and chance, how it seems impossible to make a philosophy from a mixture of what is determinate and universal, and what is invention and potential - and then, how to botch up some plan for living in this uncertainty, cf. Petronius a celebrated author with no book extant, debauché, fine administrator, accused of treachery, forced to commit suicide by Nero.Every human has an ancestry that goes way back - to Creation? Very far, at any rate. The protagonist's name, Petronia, recalls that of the old Roman Petronius - he of the banquets and orgies, trusted administrator, forced to commit suicide by Nero on fake charges of treachery. Author of a book of satires never found, maybe never written. Petronia has no link with him, that life, but modern life affords its parallels. So, why do things happen? Some good, some bad - how and why? A mysterious voyage is offered, taken on the spur: what lies beneath? How, afterwards, to live, to make more voyages, penetrate more mysteries and one's part in them? Plots and spying, manipulative friends and their catastrophies, abundant disappearances and all-too-evident deaths - enmesh her deeper and reluctantly in a grandiose scheme to partition the world - wars and consolidations - on, even to the universe. The prospect is alarming. She twists and turns - there are orgies, the underground, the upward climb - everything to find out why? Why does it happen, what does it signify, where does her feeble contribution come in? She's lucky. Much of the mystery is given an explanation. The more she knows, the deeper the mystery becomes...

Everyone is a part-time person. They do one thing while imagining being elsewhere, or being a lover, worker, fan - of something - or in some other life. We hope for a resolution, a better place, where the bad parts can be discarded, the good ones realised. In PARADISE, we are plunged into ever-deeper contradictions, separations: by nature a deserter, a pacifist, Harri is enrolled, becomes a soldier - becomes literally someone else. As a batman, he can fly - along with his superiors, with lovers who fly higher, outdistance him or, fatally, hit the ground.After many adventures, Harri finds himself in the midst of a squalid conflict. He is adviser, but also mediator. Making peace is advantageous: economically, there's the re-build. Politically, there's prestige for the new leaders. The ploy of war can be made profitable. Unfortunately - he has no ambition, whereas his temporary partners have an excess of it. In the end, he witnesses the magic inherent in humanity, which leads it to destruction, or to mediocrity. Paradise lost, or indefinitely postponed?

Every person has a calling from deep within, if they listen. Every person must live their own hero's journey if they are to fulfill it. Anne Merriman's life shines a beacon of light on how everyone can walk their own true path. Born and raised in Liverpool during World War II, Anne felt called to be a nun and joined the Medical Missionaries of Mary. After becoming a doctor and spending twenty years providing medical service to the less fortunate in Nigeria, Anne left the order and returned to the world as a layperson. Her journey had twists and turns, ups and downs, friends and enemies, and love and heartbreak. Her compassion for the less fortunate and suffering eventually led her into palliative and hospice care. Anne became an important palliative care pioneer in Singapore and Sub-Saharan Africa, receiving a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination and founding a model of palliative care for all of Africa, Hospice Africa Uganda. Anne Merriman's epic adventures, forbidden love, outlandish flair, fiery nature and Godly pursuits will have the reader laughing and crying, while also finding pearls of wisdom that only the lens of hindsight can provide. May That's How the Light Got In illuminate your own path as we all search for and live out our own meaning and purpose.

TRUE STORIES - three stories of modern life by John Fraser.True Stories poses the question: What is modern life? Struggling with bureaucracy, getting on, and off, lists? The protagonist, Kochi, and his young - then much older - friends, engage with love, philosophy ... the murder of a lover by the mother of a socialite, the centre of the hero's attention: and her reprisal. We follow them, their adventures, the search for the Great Principle, embodied by a fragile ancient, who dosses down and dies on his first night in Kochi's dwelling.Think, says the Master, but no life seems lived by Thinking. There are wildfires, concealed well-shafts, a flight by sea: happenstance determined histories. Eventually, in a declining night-club, the protagonist finds clues, a divan to sleep on, even work. All human knowledge is examined by Kochi and his new partner, the dancer, Jahan. Knowledge at last? Maybe ... The hero, Kochi, leaves by night, seeking a new adventure.Clap Your Hands traces the search for a relationship, taking us from a truncated marriage to Russia, passing through Trabzon in Turkey - the hero caged and dispatched like an exotic bird, and ending in refuge on the Danube's mouth.Smoke addresses the end of life - the narrator's, recalling his youth and his first objectives, the goals to be reached, the satisfaction to be enjoyed - entrusted to him by a sailor in a bar. The ends of life seem trivial, when you reach them - like the end of life itself. His end of life is bitter, though sometimes he remembers sweetness ... It's lived with the dissatisfied, the clueless, and the cheats ... and sadness prevails.

Mercenaries - four new tales by John FraserMercenaries: soldiers of fortune, conottieri, knight errants ... Soldiers have always been paid, somehow; a wage? ... or by their own practices of looting, enslavement, often taking it out on others for vengeance or pleasure, taking prisoners and ransoming - hostages. Yet people who soldier for the money are singled out, and looked down on ... and yet, however you do it, losing, whether done for money or the cause, is never pleasant. Being a prisoner, or dead, gives no material credit whether you are a courageous, altruistic type or needy and conscripted. Now, with people's wars, mass invasions and generalised hostilities - everyone is a soldier. At least, everybody suffers like a soldier, not all bear arms. Many are also mercenaries - have been, would like to be. They are like samurai, who cut the personal risk by doing deals with similars - momentarily, the enemy. Mercenaries concerns attempts by mercenaries to engage more mercenaries to carry out humanitarian work. Maybe it ought to work. It should be clean. What can be accomplished, tying political aims to cash? Suppose the aims are impeccable.... The short concluding pieces, Round Heaven, Square Earth, Hope and Stop, are illustrations of how political schemes might be achieved by force of will, without the cash. All our modern realities, and their dilemmas, are treated here.

The Beach consists of two new tales from John Fraser What is a human life worth? If you save someone's, what is it worth to you - and if you seek a reward, how do you get it, whatever it may be? Is that life, perhaps, the only valuable thing there is, that has value only to the person who wins twice - getting their life back, and not having to give a reward? The characters in The Beach seek answers to this question - what is a life? what worth does it have? - travelling through many remote places and civilisations. Memoirs, Memorials examines a devious spy - a spy on the secrets of life. If saving lives accumulates confusions, a heap of partial, disparate conclusions - what is a life of duplicity, fiddling, false witness and falsity in general, worth? It seems a fiction, in which someone writes all the parts and is the hero/heroine. Is it meaningless, to be condemned, or is it victimless, as victimless as ordinary, straightforward relationships and personalities - with their bad marriages, bad bargains failures, catching infections from partners who should know better?

The second volume of Unsteady States features seven of John Fraser's selected short stories and novellas.

Two novellas with the common theme of complicity. The Way Back explores the experience of war, flight and rejection. In Elementary Exercises, protagonists engage with authoritarian regimes to escape difficult situations.

This collection brings together three of Windy Dryden's favourite books that reflect his views about Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), in particular, and about counselling and psychotherapy, in general.

150 pithy reminders of important principles of single-session thinking and practice designed for busy SST therapists who want quick access to a point of good SST practice to keep in mind as they work.

Behaving Well consists of three stories on a related theme: When people are forced to leave their home, in the new place they're often told to 'behave themselves' or be sent back, to to somewhere else. In jail or equivalent, they - everyone - may be let go early for 'good behaviour'. Behaving well is a condition for staying somewhere - even somewhere you don't want to be - and 'going back' may pose dilemmas even more problematic than behaving badly. You find yourself in a chain of ill-fortunes and tragedies - a nakba, a catastrophe as one aspect of it has been called. What other rules exist, except our efforts at 'behaving well'? But, you change, through life; you watch injustices you say you cannot remedy. And your behaviour changes, together with its driving principles. If you want history - you can't have good behaviour. Good Behaviour: Alex, undocumented immigrant, is inspired, shadowed, by the adventures of Alexander, the Great. No one says Alexander behaved well - but he acted! He transformed. He shaped the classical world, scattered Greeks all over, changed cultures, till his suicidal addictions finished him. Alex starts precarious: is jailed, meets a real hero, Valerio - joins the ex-prisoners and outcasts in a barren place. There, they improvise a polity - growing natural drugs, organising an army. Valerio is their inspiration, their guide. Alex teams up with Anicette, whose inspiration is the book 'On Lying'. He spins out of control but his behaviour is consistent. People close to Alex behave in different ways, but all maintain their principles, Anicette as well. Anicette joins with a young ambitious woman, Mélisande. After the death of Alex, we see all who are left have indeed behaved well - at least, consistently. Alex, though, has acted, and imagined: the others, they only react. Anicette concludes, instructing Mélisande - the only judge of our behaviour is ourself. Misconduct: Does behaving well count for something? It doesn't seem to matter for success and failure, revelation or obscurity. In Misconduct, Matti, a political exile with aspirations of humanistic value, tries to make a life - maintaining principles, but surviving - the betrayal of his partner, unofficial enslavement. He wanders, has adventures - becomes a military strategist, travels to the stepps with a lady jockey - but his life is seeing others ride away, betray, or suffer punishments, promotions - which he's been unabvle to prevent or even understand. Ultimately, his organisation gives him the mission - to assassinate the Chief. To do so means his organisation will be expunged - a mass non-violent movement, non-violent, exposed. But for the otther opposition, assassination means a civil war that they are bound to lose. Matti would betray his principles, his own morality - and probably involve all oppositions in disaster. But - loyalty, behaving well or badly - he has no choice. Many real circumstances involve the exiled militants in just this - perfidious - choice.Catastrophe: The catastrophe is that everything happens comes to an end - without a scrap of meaning, still less justice, truth, equity. Some people behave very poorly: Yannick who has 'saved' Hana and enslaved her, Pavel .... for others, the behaviour is just on the edge of awful - Typhaine .... Dr Hoffman sees and can do nothing except register. Hana has character, but no context where the character can assert itself or, indeed, be good or bad.

John Fraser’s latest work of fiction follows the refugee Khalil in two related stories, ‘The Refugees’ and ‘Travels with Strangers’.  We are all refugees seeking an entry to soCaucasmewhere when we’ve left somewhere else. Our knowledge is a raft that’s carried us on lumpy seas. We can forget all that when we arrive. It doesn’t serve. We don’t, of course, stop being refugees, not ever, but we have a lot of living to do while we’re forgetting where we were before.  It’s a commonplace, to say we’re strangers to ourselves – not only when we are alone, but especially when we are in company. Khalil comes from a ruined land, chooses the obvious role in his  new places – acting. On film, where someone else will edit him. He longs to find the treasure we all want – and isn’t his, or ours.  He flits through ‘Travels with Strangers’ too – but people of all spots and stripes are rolling down, shaken from their safe spots – and finish in the Caucasus! A place that once was Eden – and they try to plant and harvest there again. It doesn’t necessarily work. It’s strange, because they’re of all human types. Maybe the world wasn’t made for people, or maybe it’s too far gone for them to find a space to think and talk. And how they talk! Seek love and sex and something – nothing - in between. There must be, of course, conclusion. Khalil’s a fine dancer - exhibition standard. That’s a gift! 

John Fraser's latest work of fiction People You Will Never Meet consists of three thematically-linked trajectories. In the first, two Palestinians escape to humble, even humiliating work in Belgium. They manage to set themselves up as a think-tank above a public dance-hall, and their lives divide between the search for a lofty principle and the drinking and music in the floor below. The link between the levels is provided by a fussy, garrulous first-person narrator, whose own adventures turn out to signify little. There is a party, where the upper and lower worlds mingle, the protagonist dressed as moths and butterflies. The Palestinians move on - one to a ruined Syria, the other to frustration in Europe. The second tale involves a bright country girl, seduced by her teacher with aspirations to a powerful career. She seeks speed, which does not end well for her. In the final tale, the hero aims higher still - a project for the human species. This involves journeying through Eastern Europe, and its underground. Its climax is the burning of a stranger's house, and a long long wait for a slow train...

IMPORTANT NOTE: PLEASE IGNORE THE ;S 1-2 MONTH DELIVERY DELAY WARNING: ON AMAZON.CO.UK - IF YOU BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON IT SHOULD BE DELIVERED WITHIN A WEEK.Overnight Taylor Amber's life is transformed when his parents die under mysterious circumstances and he becomes an orphanin the Diggory Home for Children in Distress. Taylor eventually befriends another Diggory long-termer, a spiky misfit of a girl called Georgie Yates.But soon afterwards Taylor discovers an incredible secret: his physicist parents had not been working at the local university as he had always assumed. They were in fact head scientists for a secret organisation called TARGET (Time Agency Response Group: Earthly Threats),and on the day of their deaths they were about to embark on the maiden flight in BULLSEYE, the world's first time machine.With BULLSEYE at his disposal, Taylor quickly realises that he has the power to rescue his parents from their fate and bring them back from the dead. But unknown to Taylor and Georgie, there is a deadly menace that is about to threaten the entire world ...taylor amber: time agent is a riveting, suspenseful time travel adventure; a bittersweet tale of a teenage boy-girl relationship;a metaphysical thriller on the implications of messing with the fabric of spacetime, and a genuinely moving story of two young people's shared experience of loss. It is also at times, very funny, with a huge cast of richly imaginative characters from both ends of the time spectrum, from the deep past to a terrifying future ...The novel crawls with suspicious agents, police, boffins - few of them being what they claim to be, and several sets of enemies.In the scary worlds of Earth and Deep Space, the only person Taylor can trust is Georgie.

Human life is made up of a series of journeys, and every stage is an experienceand purpose in the long history of life's challenges. But there are two journeysevery person must undertake, a physical and a spiritual one; and whilstthe physical one is essential there is also need for a spiritual one.The Torah as a guide enables us to attain both ends. To be a Jew is to be on a journey and as a people we have never stood still.Judaism teaches that life is one long journey through time, and each movementand stoppage serves a higher purpose and better future. In his role as rabbi and educator, Rabbi Simon S. Silas places great emphasis onJewish learning and Torah values and in this edited version of 'Sermons and Articles'delivered over the years to Sephardi congregations in North West London,Rabbi Silas has quoted a treasury of statements from the Bible, Talmud, Midrash andRabbinic literature in the belief that their ethical and spiritual themes offer wisecounsel in our role as being the eternal people of God. As he comments: 'Life's Journeys has been a labour of love. I hope that this work, filled with the wisdomof Scripture and Rabbinic commentaries, will inspire readers to a deeper understandingof our faith in God and direct them to face the challenges in "life's journeys".'

Retired investigator Richard Palmer lives in the Charterhouse, a charity case engaged in regular altercations with the Preacher who is trying to make him conform. Nearly everyone has died, among them Chief Minister Cecil his old client and William Shakespeare his bête noir, the one who got away.A letter from his goddaughter Miracle in Oxford brings him up short. Her foster parents have died, she is in trouble; and she is in love with an impecunious student who harbours a dream to go to London, the Court and make his name as a writer. Worse, William Davenant fancies himself to be Shakespeare's heir in body as well as soul.Palmer brings Miracle back to London to lodge with his old flame Emilia Lanier. The story charts Miracle's fate and the rise of the charming and unreliable Davenant in the houses of the nobility and the world of court musicians and actors including the brilliant Nicholas Lanier and a crusty old survivor in the Kings' Men, John Hemmings. Meantime the Caroline age succeeds the Jacobean leading on to Civil War.

The work of Dr John Auping seeks to assist readers to differentiate observationally verified aspects of cosmology from ideas whose verification is distant, or perhaps impossible. Such a task is performed by using a careful application of the orthodox scientific method. This English edition is a part of Auping's original work especially devoted to the description of the dynamics of stars, and the analysis of the Big Bang, steady state and multiverse models from a critical point of view. The author approaches different aspects of the evolution of the Universe using different branches of astrophysics, Newtonian mechanics, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, quantum physics and general relativity, with a clear and concise narrative. Mathematical boxes support the deeper study of mathematical-physical relations, which can be omitted by readers who are not specialised. The mix of science, science fiction and metaphysics in modern cosmology is analysed with strict hard core scientific arguments. The history of cosmology reveals ideas, many times antagonistic, both at the level of the interpretation of astrophysical observations, and at the level of the speculations about the origin of the Universe and the fine-tuning of its physical constants, that made it possible that we are here to discuss it. The search for the truth about the origin of the Universe necessarily touches on philosophical issues. Firstly, starting from Popper's philosophy of science, the author clarifies where exactly the frontier lies between science, science fiction and metaphysics. It then appears that in the final analysis of the scientific fact of fine-tuning present in the Big Bang, we are left with only two rational options to explain it: a multiverse, which the author shows to be science fiction, sometimes with a-theological intentions; or an intelligent cause, which is part of the discourse in the frontier of physics and metaphysics, with obvious theological implications. The dialogue between faith and science is expressed clearly and objectively in this work, where the observable and the logically demonstrable, set the pattern of what is true.

What is victory? What would victory actually be in our present world? What would revolution be - and what would happen after?In John Fraser's latest novel, Mack meets an old combatant, a revolutionary, his revolution accomplished: satisfied. He leaves his girlfriend Sophie, but never shakes her off. He tries revealed religion, mysticism, sex. Through his showy friend, Paco, he meets Aurora - a flaky performer, a woman every man would die for her. He tries to define what's on the inside from the outside - specifically, a poor, resource-rich country, between revolt and foreign intervention.He joins a committee deciding between a project for reform: justice: complicity ... or colluding with a persecuted opposition. Complexity gradually comes to prevail... He takes refuge in isolation, a leisure centre-cum retreat, where political plotting carries on, a kind of Mongol wave may be in preparation. He recoils: neither reform nor revolutionary onslaught - both certainty, predictability, that is, and destruction - are to his taste.As his latest girl is seduced by his new best friend, he returns to the beginning: for tomorrow is the victory…