Guy Kennaway – författare

In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her.

88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilised catatonia. The son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result.

In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this book is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms.

During their conversations about when and how to make Susie''s final exit, some of the difficulties of their fractious relationship mellowed and some even melted, as the reality of what they were planning brought them together.

Many elderly people, like Susie, have clearly stated that they wish to die in a manner and time of their choosing. But the church, the law, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry stand in the way, wagging their fingers.

A change is coming for the rights of the elderly, the way it has come for the rights of women and gay people. Time to Go is a rallying call in this fight.

Life is too precious not to be lived properly. As with a job, a relationship or a party, you have to know when it''s time to go.

Set in the world of contemporary art, Guy Kennaway''s new novel delivers his trademark absurdities and laugh out loud moments.

As the globe''s most successful super-dealer, Herman Gertsch spent his charmed life jettiing between his galleries in Zurich, London and New York, fawned over by artists, curators, politicians and the uber-rich.

As Herman''s empire grew, nothing seemed to get in his way, until he made the calamitous decision to open a gallery in a rural English backwater. Here, Herman encountered John ''Brother'' Burn, a penniless hippy known as the slipperiest man in south Somerset, and therefore the western hemisphere.

In the riotous comedy of errors that follows, Kennaway pours mistaken identity, Amazonian tribesmen, Swiss food, DMT, Arab Royalty, million dollar paintings and worthless tat onto a spin painting of a story that dazzles with surprises and leaves you feeling reassuringly warm about art and life.

When Guy Kennaway, 63, a white, middle class, overweight, English, Tory-voting writer met Hussein Sharif, 22, an African-born, inner city, Tory-hating Muslim, they assumed they had little in common. But newly related by marriage, they decided to go on a walk through Britain to get to know each other. Guy''s mission was to explain to Hussein how wonderful British life and culture was, and Hussein''s was to describe to Guy the realities of life as a young black Muslim in Britain in 2019. Over a forty-mile hike they made friends, fell out, told stories, encountered strangers, argued, laughed and got very sore feet. Held up by COVID-19 and dramatically diverted by BLM, they reached the end of their walk together, but for both of them it marked the start of a new and more important journey.

Good Scammer tells the story of Clive 'Bangaz' Thompson, an orphan born in west Jamaica raised with no love, education, or prospects of ever getting a decent job. He designs an ingenious business model that brings millions of dollars annually to the little villages around the sandy inlets of the Jamaican coast, making himself a vast personal fortune and a hero to his community. He achieves all of this without using a knife or a gun or even the threat of violence.

Many people see scammers as simple criminals.

But Bangaz's life, when seen from his perspective as a victim of the theft and duplicity of slavery and colonialism, tells a different, more complex human story. Through his eyes, our sympathy and smiles justifiably remain with him and his righteous band of reparation bredren.