The Photograph - Softcover

A man sits on a beach, watching his grandchildren play in the sand. He remembers a story told to him by a friend, thirty years ago. He still has the photograph of his friend sitting on a sofa with his daughter. He has kept it all these years as a reminder. The story is about assassinations, the Vatican and East West relations, in the cold war years. It was sensational then and probably still is. He has never understood why he was told, or what he was supposed to do with the story. Now that his friend, a world church leader has died, he feels able to share it. As he remembers some of the details, like the tide ebbing and flowing on the beach, he moves in and out of his own memories of international conferences and experiences – Poland, Romania, Kiev and Moscow, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Dallas, New York and Venice. These are woven into other assassinations – Lincoln, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Arafat, Sadat. He recalls different attempts to negotiate Peace Treaties in the Middle East and beyond. They all seem to be merging and overlapping within the same, moving jigsaw puzzle of memory and interpretation. As he shifts his perspective from place to place, he wonders who else knows what is at the heart of this story and how much of his memory was imagination or interpretation. Then, as his deckchair sinks deeper into the sand of the beach and the tide comes closer in, he realises that what he really wants is another ice cream!