Xavier Leret

*****"Mix together Romeo and Juliette with Bonnie and Clyde and throw them into J.D Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and you'll get an explosive, brilliant and breath taking novel: Heaven Sent, by debut author Xavier Leret." evie-bookish

*****"A wonderful coming-of-age story meshing dark experience with the dictates of religious rules and heavenly mercy, this is a book to savor and remember long after reading." Sheila Deeth

*****"A novel with a lasting effect…highly recommended!" Amazon.com

*****"A heartbreaking, beautiful, romantic story, if you ever find the same love that these main characters have keep it!" Book Girl Addict

*****"Leret displays a deftness with language and dialect that leaves the reader feeling eerily connected with the teenaged protagonists, who feel severed from the society in which they live." Marjorie. GoodReads

*****"a work of genius." Best Selling Author Steve Emmett

It is here from on high. HEAVEN SENT has descended. Currently available here at Amazon and Smashwords, Barnes And Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple and Diesel. At the bargain price of just $3.99

Sixteen year old Carlo has no experience of the world. He desperately wants eternity to provide an alternative to the strict moral imperative of his Catholic parents. When Daizee Byatt, a girl from the other side of the tracks, crashes into Carlo's life, the course of his future veers off the road. This is the story of what Heaven Sent.

You can read a sample by clicking on the BookBuzzr widget to the left.

His mother woke him early the next morning by throwing off the covers from his bed. She was dressed in nun black, her bobbed hair was set with razor edges.

Rise and shine, she said.

What time is it? he asked.

Seven, she answered. It is time to get ready for church.

An hour and half later he was standing in church, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and green tie, below blue painted clouds with pink fluffs heralded by fat cherubs with trumpets, standing with his hands in his pockets holding his new phone. Because breakfast was forbidden on Sunday, due to the holiness of communion, his stomach groaned with starvation as he watched the priest who was decorated in a purple chasuble with a thick red wine strip down the front, with a double italic crucifix on his chest, presenting to the gathered a silver chalice. An altar boy, decorated in a red cassock and white smock was kneeling to his right. Every Sunday the performance at the altar was the same. Carlo watched and wondered that if there was eternal life whether it would involve going to church everyday, or would God demand that you just kneel forever in his light and occasionally get up when it was your turn to make the tea. He knew what hell was, he had seen the pictures of the torture gardens, but it struck him that an equally powerful depiction of heaven had yet to be conceived.

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Word from on high.

Heaven Sent by Xavier Leret is descending.

I am pleased to announce that I am to be a Blog Tour Host for Novel Publicity. You can check out their stuff here. I will reviewing up and coming new releases and hosting interviews and authors here on my site. I'm very excited.

A sense of loss pervades Sherman Alexie's powerful and beautiful story, THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD, in which the picking up of fellow Native American hitchhikers is a 'ceremony'. It is beyond an act of kindness, it is a tradition that has been passed down to him by his father and it is a means for our narrator to keep in touch with his culture and his sense of spiritual being.

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“History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalisation of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanisation of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and the true within historical consciousness.”

Guy Debord – Society Of The Spectacle.

What is time? Time is the line on which history unfolds and history is the narrative of our past, our cultural make up and identities, our collective understanding of our beginnings, the truth and the fictions of our heroes and villains, the myths, the documents of decisions made, the images of moments captured. Time is the abstract measure by which we live, the clocks beating towards our death and death is final and absolute. However, the theory of relativity put paid to that notion of time being absolute because observers attempting to measure light speed each held identical clocks, which were, at times, in disagreement. Moving clocks, for example, tick more slowly than stationary clocks.

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“Wake up! Wake up!” Her breath like a fish out of water. Pupils on. What time? Where? Trash. In her nose. Hands damp. The smell. Filth in her hair. Feet kick. Arms, thighs, hips. Eyes wide. Head jerks. Out. 

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Alright my luvlies! I've been busy copy editing Heaven Sent ready for its full descent to an outlet near you – in other words just one cheeky little clickety click away – and it'll be at a bargain price, don't you worry none (even though its stealing food from my babies' lips).

Now, part of this weeks process has been sorting out Daizee's voice, who doesn't actually appear in this chapter, but she does feature extensively in the earlier chapters that are posted. I've been fine tuning her Bristol accent. I'd be interested to hear what you think, so please do have a look see, as I have updated those earlier posts. But for now, without further ado, here is the next installment of Heaven Sent.

At 9.30 the next morning Carlo walked out of the Carphone Warehouse in Broadmead with a plastic carrier bag. He had his own number and was feeling like his own man as he walked home through the shopadel of windows, not daring to take the phone out in case someone saw him. The church had a network of eyes everywhere, the subways, the concrete office blocks, the coagulated traffic, behind the green doors of the massage parlours, the burger bar painted with confederate colours, the bombed out tower block, the giant bar that had once been the city temple, under a railway bridge. Everywhere he walked he felt eyes on him.

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