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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:            Tom Walker (210) 829-8137

                                                                tomwak@mygrande.net

                                            

           Have we the Unalienable Right to Take Our Own Lives?

That’s the question author Tom Walker asks in A Day in the Life, a satirical novel about a retired English professor, George Noel Gordon Bombazine, who sees no reason to go on living.

The novel is set in the Sonoran desert of southwest Arizona, where Bombazine lives alone with his old dog, Argos, in a spooky lopsided split-level ranch-style house formerly used for the Witness Protection Program. As Bombazine rises at dawn on his seventieth birthday, he plans to kill himself that night. He knows exactly how and where he will do it. He plans to drive his Mercedes E-Class hybrid through a gap in a frontage road wall, off a cliff into cold dark lake water far below. Like the Romantic poet Shelley, Bombazine can’t swim.

If he continues to live, he faces nothing but misery and deterioration. Retired from his professorship at nearby Mount Olympus College, he has become a recluse. His second wife has left him for another teacher in his department, and his first wife killed herself thirty years ago. His estranged son and sister despise him while hounding him for money. His memory is failing, he’s an overweight alcoholic who has not had sex in five years, he hears strange noises at night, and recently he’s been diagnosed with an intermediate stage of prostate cancer.

Why go on living with nothing but pain and loneliness ahead? Yet he hopes that something might happen to make him cling to life. And hour by hour during the day, things do happen—sex, love, friendship, forgiveness, even the chance to contribute to a Hollywood screenplay. But do they happen in time, and will they be enough? At times the answer appears to be Yes, but every hope is dashed. The ending, on that high cliff above the lake, is a surprise.

Though the plot sounds grim, the narrative is liberally spiced with humor.

Tom Walker’s short story collection Signed Confessions was published in 2012. He also authored a history book, Banking on Tradition, in 2000. He has written hundreds of magazine features, profiles, and reviews. Formerly the editor of SA: The Magazine of San Antonio and two airline magazines (Southwest and Continental), he is now writing the family histories of two dynasties dating back to the Norman Invasion of 1066.

A Day in the Life is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble (as a Nook Book), iTunes, Smashwords, Kindle, Kobo, and in book stores on request. Readings and signings will be held at The Twig book shop in San Antonio and BookPeople in Austin.