Leigh Kennedy – författare

It is hard to say how it started - all the unexplained little signs of a new baby about the house in ''The Silent Cradle'' - but soon none of the O''Bannons could deny that there had been a highly irregular addition to the family. In ''Max Haunting'' a middle-aged hippie, preserved almost intact from the Sixties, starts showing up on the doorsteps of his old friends and loves who, in acquiring jobs and furniture, have ''sold out'' rather less than he thought. Hauntings of curious varieties continue in other stories: the sort manufactured out of glass by a man who thinks his godly wife deserves a miracle; the visitation of a mother''s cruelty into the mind of her daughter as she confronts the frustrations of coping with her own child; the specters of opportunities lost or spurned which nag to be laid, like ghosts. Elsewhere Leigh Kennedy considers the impulse of cannibalism in a future world whose greed has induced ecological upheaval, and the phenomenon of speaking in tongues as investigated by a sociology professor. She views the world through the eyes of a victim of seizures and of a primatologist whose devotion to apes has gone a bit too far.

College student Nicholas Dal shares the family talent, or curse - he is an empath, a man who experiences the emotions of other people. Too-powerful emotion can induce seizures, so to stay sane he must live alone and dull his senses with vodka.This, in itself, would be enough for anyone to bear, but Nicholas ias also haunted by a secret from his family''s past in Russia. Now someone is looking for him and he fears the worst. To further complicate things, a relationship is forming with a young woman, Jack, and his feelings for her threaten to break through his isolation. Will Nicholas risk his love, his sanity - his life - to be with Jack?

As a boy Phil Benson tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball. He could see that his real passion, classical music, was considered somehow subversive - not really American. That is why Mr Tackett''s became such a haven for him. Away from the uninspiring pitch and the disapproving ear of his father at home, Phil found at his piano teacher''s a sanctuary for his musical conspiracy with the universe to flourish.Katie Doheney was the victim of another sort of conspiracy - or so she was convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real-life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie''s every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson.By the time Phil was ready to go East and make everyone proud of him, no ordinary bond had grown up between Katie and himself. They understood each other''s obsessions. Phil''s keyboard was Katie''s bomb shelter and from Cuban missile crisis to the raid on Tripoli the curious duet played on.Leigh Kennedy''s disarming and irresistible novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. But that''s the least you would expect from two people who alone, as far as we know, have already been through World War Three.