Karen’s Review
There are times in our busy lives when we stop. Stop to breath a moment. Stop because we are waiting. It is the latter that I am focusing on.
It could be on a break, or lunch hour at work. It could also be waiting for an appointment, as a passenger in a car, or travelling on a bus or train. In fact, I am referring to absolutely anything where you find you have time on your hands.
And what do we do with that time? Aimlessly scroll through our phones I would imagine, everyone does these days, including me.
I have a suggestion. Read a book. Yes, you heard me correctly. I can hear the but coming, so just listen.
I’m suggesting Ray, a novella by Tony McManus. It is hundred and ten pages long. This is a neat, no words spared, story. The author has done a great job in bringing you something entertaining and absorbing.
Ray is the life story of a man who tells us about his best mate. How they grew up together, took out girls, drank a lot, and had a passion for motorbikes. Eventually, they meet a couple of nice women, settle down and start a family. All sounds normal enough until Ray vanishes leaving his family and friends to wonder what happened to him.
The author does an excellent job of adding mystery and all the while drawing you into the characters. It may only be small, but this book pulls no punches. It takes you on a journey, from Manchester, via the Isle of Man, over to Bangkok where it finishes up.
I loved it, which is why I am wholeheartedly recommending it to you. It’s clever, inspiring, and true to life.
I spoke to Tony about his book recently, and this is what he said, ‘Although the story is fiction, it is based on a true event. A man walked out of his home one evening after work. He never returned. He left a wife and three children. Many years later he turned up. He’d died in a Seaman’s Mission in Sidney, Australia.’
Description
“Ray and I were best mates. We met as fifteen year old indentured tool room apprentices, at the Avro Aircraft Company in Manchester, and we hit it off from the start. By the time we reached eighteen, there was a whole gang of us, around ten guys, Avro apprentices all. But me and Ray were the core, the gang founders, the leaders.”
Set in Manchester, England and Chiang Mai, Thailand, “Ray” is a powerful story of abandonment, rejection and betrayal. But also a story of fulfilment, enduring love, an unquenchable friendship and a paradise found.
Karen J. Mossman 
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