A special letter from a reader.

15.04.2023

You are awesome. Your emails embrace me with warmth and emotion, for which I am very grateful. Today I decided to share a special letter with you.

Thank you, Ken.

Greetings James from Australia.

I have just finished reading Gate D5 and I would like to do several things. Firstly, I want to congratulate you on writing such an excellent, complex and moving novel. Your novel is complex not only in terms of the relationships between characters but also in the structure of the work. From the beginning, I was very interested in Tom and Chris but the complexity in the plot was because incidents seemed not to be following a regular time sequence. And then I realised that you challenged the reader to understand that time shifts occurred within chapters. This reminds me of the opening lines of Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot: Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. This understanding of time is reflected in Gate D5 and so your complex writing resonated with my own philosophy and you therefore engaged me in every sense. So, as I understood the complexity of the structure of this powerful novel which stimulated my thinking and importantly my emotions. I am not ashamed to admit that I was deeply moved and to the point of tears. It is not often to find a novel which proved such richness. The next point is a personal one. My life has been rich and satisfying in so many ways for I have been a teacher in primary and tertiary education. Half my primary teaching was with full-time classes of intellectually gifted children and my tertiary work was in teacher education. After taking early retirement, I devoted myself to working as a consultant to gifted students, their parents and to schools attempting to provide for these neglected students. In addition I trained in acting in London and managed to use this in my teaching strategies as well as engaging in carefully selected stage performances. I share these things with you to give you some understanding for the strength of my response to your work. But there is one final fact about me that I wish to share and that is that on 18th November, I will celebrate my 90th birthday, and from this ancient one I consider myself blessed to have read your extraordinary work of literary art.

Regards Ken