Art Imitates Life in Imaginative New Novel

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About the Book

A Book in Time is a love story about a book’s longing over two centuries for the mother who bore it. Adopted by many different owners – some loving, others unscrupulous – this book longs to be reunited with an elderly author who cherished it as if it was her only child. As the book passes through many hands, it observes not only the way people treat it, but each other, and in all of this, its mother’s love sets the high standard against which everything is lovingly judged.

In a strange demonstration of synchronicity, the author – Mark Stibbe – experienced the culmination of his own search for a mother after completing this novel. Having been orphaned in 1960, and having never met or known his birth mother, Mark met her for the first time at the end of 2021, shortly before she died. So, there is more than a hint of Mark’s own search in the book’s quest for its author.

In the case of A Book in Time, in perhaps a unique way, art has magically imitated life even as life has magically imitated art.

About the Author

Dr Mark Stibbe is the winner of the first ever Page Turner Award for Fiction Writing (2020). He has been described recently by the New York Times as “an acclaimed writer.”

Mark has been writing books since he was 16 and has clocked up over 50 titles since then. Mark’s PhD on storytelling was completed in 1982 and published by Cambridge University press.

Mark was a Vicar for 25 years so most of his works have been religious nonfiction released through traditional publishing houses. He was awarded ‘Christianity’s’ book of the year in 2010.

Mark has ghost written over thirty books for clients of his company BookLab. Through this company, Mark and his team have helped hundreds of new authors to get published.

Lately, Mark has mostly migrated from nonfiction to fiction and has been writing novels in the magical realism genre. His novel ‘A Book in Time’ was picked as the overall winner out of hundreds of entries in the prestigious and popular Page Turner Awards.

Mark’s twin sister Claire is also a full-time novelist. In 2021, she won the Page Turner Award one year after Mark won the same prize. This makes Mark and Claire a unique phenomenon in the publishing world – twins who have won the same literary award in consecutive years!

As adopted children, they had a huge advantage; their adoptive father was a star pupil and friend of CS Lewis. He was also at Merton, Oxford where J.R.R. Tolkien was professor of English.

Mark is now a full-time writer who lives in Kent with his wife Cherith and their Black Labrador Bella. In recent years, he has been a judge for literary awards and is a popular speaker.

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