Bøger af Jon Elkon

A crime thriller with a gay theme

When the novel was first published, MOST critics were full of praise! 'Fairly waltzes the reader along...the mixture of the mundane and the fantastic is deceptively artless, the prose full of energy and humour and beneath the playfulness there is an undertow of pain...a thought-provoking and entertaining debut.' - Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph. 'Funny, bright and painfully sad...' Helen Shaw, Irish Times. 'Immensely appealing...Umfaan's Heroes is a winner from cover to cover from an author with an abundance of talent.' Evelyn Holzhausen Cape Times. 'Excellent...is this Tom Sharpe territory? No, but there are many rich ironies reminiscent of Sharpe's good, if bitter sweet scenes of farce.... a fine, realistic novel.' Margaret Forster Sunday Times. Only the snob at Publisher's Weekly was sniffy. So I wonder why that was the review Amazon chose to use? A richly funny and painful story Umfaan's Heroes is a fantasy and a political novel in spite of itself, with a seasoning of Science Fiction with a unique insight into living under the insane madness of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Lovers of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Sharpe, Ursula Le Guin and Franz Kafka will enjoy this book. Aware of his incarnations in past lives, Tom Bloch, 18-year-old army conscript - South African, white, Jewish - in a prison cell, is condemned to death for terrorism. The novel relates Tom's journey to his cell, how he was befriended by a witch-doctor claiming to be a harvester (of bodies!) from another planet, via his fist fight with his father, his friendship with an Afrikaner boy, experiments with drugs to this gloomy place with the hangman's noose dangling outside. Just as well that Tom has always regarded life as an interlude between deaths for he soon becomes dangerously involved with the Mandela-like figure of Absolom. And madness, death and insane comedy is the only winner....

It is the 1970's in hippie London. Tom Bloch, a South African spy, learns he is likely to inherit several millions from his dead grandmother Hazel. We discover how she met and fell in love with the priapic Count Laszlo Mindchyck, the Laszlo of the title, only to run away into the mists of war when bullied and tormented by his dreadful offspring. And how, many years later, she drops dead when informed that she is his heir...leaving Tom, her heir, likely to inherit everything. But there are conditions! Tom has nine months to prove that he is a responsible member of society and not a drug-fuelled hippie spy with a pathologically murderous wife...will a mere £68 million be enough to persuade Tom to wear a three-piece suit and betray his friends? Tom's adventures over these nine months take the reader on a journey which is both hilarious and heartbreaking.

Some Day Soon is a collection of thirty years of poems from Jon Elkon, Author of the satirical novels Umfaan's Heroes, Laszlo's Millions and Sally's Road. The poems are mystical, political, charismatic, catatonic, catastrophic, and comic. There are no poems about cats.

When I lost some dearly beloved close relatives to Cancer, I vowed to get my revenge! And the best revenge is: 1. Satire; 2. Money to Cancer Research! Sally's Road is a sad, funny, funnily sad excursion into suburbia in a modern housing estate in the Midlands of dear old England. Sally is a young teacher, recently married to the dullard Graham, aching for excitement and a new life - aspirations which are clouded by the fact that she has Hodgkin's disease, an aggressive and persistent form of cancer. In Spireslea, she is surrounded by what at first seem to be a crushingly boring selection of aspiring middle-class posers, eccentric grand dames, fake majors ('he was a sergeant major actually', according to the nasally impaired postmaster) and has no other companion than her faithful diary. Archers fans or lovers of Tom Sharpe's books may recognise the types! As the book unfolds she begins to realise that the locals are each in the midst of complex and fantastic lives, which encroach on her solitary world in a bizarre desire to take it over...Gradually as the cancer gains in strength so does Sally, especially after young Annie - tousled, tomboyish and tangled up in her own story of kidnap, murder and brothers called Peverill - comes tumbling over the garden fence and changes her life. The adventures of these two mismatched co-conspirators take them into an international plot to steal a drug from a research facility in Omaha Nebraska, via plots of murder, rape and theft in a furious struggle against that biggest foe of all - cancer. There is a great deal of fact and experience behind this novel. Many of the details are real, only names and characters have been changed.... ROYALTIES IN AID OF CANCER RESEARCH