Böcker av Jon Ferguson

LONELINESS IS A KILLER, so people have said... and Martha is lonely, even though a neurological quirk makes her see familiar faces everywhere. To the extent that she has to hold down tricky conversations with jostling, self-important dollar bills, go lip-to-lip with a Hollywood icon, and ride a warhorse with a stiff and spectacular General, all within the same square mile.Neil Baker doesn't even have quirks to break through his monotonous existence but don't let us the readers be guilty of overlooking him too. Though exhaustion makes his soul invisible.Martha and Neil don't meet. But they have a common denominator in Aaron, a quiet, sensitive and ardently faithful boy, who doesn't fit in either - despite his loving family and his prayers - and who feels the full force of the dramas that encircle him.In this, the very first novel he committed to paper, and now being published for the first time, Jon Ferguson paints a transatlantic, era-crossing world of pain and humour that has a lot in common with classics such as Under Milkwood and Ulysses while retaining his modern American voice. Imagine Holden Caulfield writing To the Lighthouse.A stretch too far? Open this book and let it take you there.

'How do birds see the world? Do they have a totally different way of experiencing life than humans do? Are they stoic? Is their threshold of pain and loneliness completely different from ours?Can a bird die of a broken heart?'In case you haven't figured it out, what I'm trying to say is that when I was six years old and had a guinea pig, I didn't ask any of these kinds of questions. The guinea pig was just a damn guinea pig and I petted it and fed it and cleaned its cage, but I sure as hell didn't worry about a zillion ramifications of its mental condition. I'm trying to say that with age - in my case from six to sixteen - the world has become a whole lot more complicated.'After witnessing the death of her mother at the age of eight, life is never going to be simple for Laura Winger... but, from Disneyland to Venice, her dad succeeds in making it a whole lot easier.If reading Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye moved you because of the narrator's unease with childhood transitioning to adolescence, Ferguson's narrator in Don't Bullshit Me Daddy - 16-year-old Laura Winger - will move you to embrace the inescapable rite of passage into old age and certain mortality. Yes, there are still some 'phonies' out there, but this novel - rather than being about the loss of innocence - affirms that innocence exists in everyone.

"The old man scratched his head. On the one hand he wanted every creature's story to be told and respected. On the other hand he knew all stories were partial and that real truth could never be told. Never ever can you understand another life - or even your own. Is this a tragedy or a blessing? The old man pondered." Expanding on the fergusonian universe, often explored in his fiction titles, Jon Ferguson shares an old man's ponderings on subjects including life, death, the media, music, madness, Tilou the cat, and the sound a cork makes when it pops out of a good bottle of red."Music and wine gave sparkle to the old man's existence. Winemakers were also composers to be honored and revered. Their symphonies flowed from the bottle after the corks had sounded the first note." Perfect for dipping in and out of! Or read it cover to cover to experience a deeply moving, overarching narrative about love, ageing and isolation.Humour abounds, as always.

Three Forgotten Tales, of which 'Mary & God' is the second, is a trilogy that rewrites the story of Jesus; his life, crucifixion, and legacy. Written mainly around imagined conversations between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Pilate and several disciples, the books also contain breathtaking descriptions of power, nature and - most of all - love. Regardless of your religious or philosophical convictions, all three volumes will leave you deeply moved and wondering at the immensity of the universe.

"I didn't see my father again until the morgue yesterday. He looked all right, a little pinker and puffier than usual. Then they closed the lid." For Adam Lamb, this loss is definitely not an existentialist experience. Instead, the funeral guests - who slowly drift in to a service where the pastor's only role is to keep his mouth shut and let the music play - open the lid on his dad's own philosophy. In a tender moment, with the friends, ex-lovers, and colleagues of the late Charley Lamb raising a drink and sharing memories, Adam experiences the peeling back of accumulated years....as the evening wore on, all these people around the table, though at least a half a century old - except Barbara Chardon and myself - started looking much younger. I began seeing their faces as if they were the ages they were when all these things happened. Lou-Lou was seventeen. Isabella was twenty-five. Pittet and Danny Dapper were cruising through their forties and fifties. And I was seeing my father through the years after he moved to Switzerland and made a life for himself - both before and after he made me.But the life-changing surprise for him isn't his dad's colourful past, or the momentary shift in time and space. It's connected to the hand that gently touches his elbow and escorts him to the cemetery, as the moon hangs like a streetlamp over the Alps.This novel explores the theme of love in a most original way. Ferguson has a unique voice that is unmistakably his own, despite there being echoes of Camus, Maupassant, Proust, Sartre, as well as Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Philosophical and conversational at the same time and, ultimately, deeply moving.

Three Forgotten Tales, of which 'Jesus & Mary' is the first, is a trilogy that rewrites the story of Jesus; his life, crucifixion, and legacy. Written mainly around imagined conversations between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Pilate and several disciples, the books also contain breathtaking descriptions of power, nature and - most of all - love. Regardless of your religious or philosophical convictions, all three volumes will leave you deeply moved and wondering at the immensity of the universe.

Philip Papp cuts a rather sad version of Michelangelo's 'David', but that doesn't seem to matter post-deluge. He still manages to attract a small crowd of spectators, most days, from his first-floor window. After the flood, Betty Swain's old, arthritic fingers are free to work their magic with impunity and (bless her heart) for no fixed fee. Bereft, bemused widowers are happy to pay her a fair rate. Ask Bill the policeman. Who sent the mysterious flood? Decided which people would perish? (Eighty-five percent of us drowned.) Did ambition, religion, and censure recede and evaporate with it for good? Jon Ferguson has written a novel that holds a mirror up to a western hierarchy all but saturated with covetousness, media, and law enforcement. Humorous and joyful, with fat droplets of pathos...is it a utopian or dystopian vision? The thing is, your need to judge and pigeonhole might not even survive the narrative.

NOT A WORD IN 2004 ran the (fictional) San Fransisco Chronicle's headline. By his own public admission, for 18 months Ted Foster "rarely rotated his noggin left or right because there was nothing it wanted to look at".But what had put him into this catatonic stupor? Seems we could be about to find out... "On Larry King Live," he writes in chapter one, "I only had about forty-five minutes and he kept changing the subject to keep his ratings up. But now I've got a book. I can say whatever I want to say for as long as I want to say it..." And it turns out it's not his marriage, it's not that he's entered his fifties, it's not insane world events...It's something much smaller...Jon Ferguson has written a novel rich in character, philosophy and humour, that engages the reader to the extent that you will want Ted Foster to keep on "pecking out" his life story. From page one the book poses a question about "who the loonies are": Foster's pretty sure it's not him...

We all have regrets. Many of them come from our attempts to fulfill unmet longings. The problem is many of us get stuck in in an endless cycle of longing and regret, unable to move forward. In this guide, Dave and Jon Ferguson want to help people recognize specific regrets, release them to God, and learn to see regrets as an opportunity to start over. There are three types of regret: ¿ Regrets of Action ¿ Regrets of Inaction ¿ Regrets of Reaction Our hope is that we would all come to see that God is big enough to redeem even our worst regrets. He can use everything for a greater good. Nothing needs to keep us from the joy and purpose God has for our lives! We can start over and live a life beyond regret. Group leaders will find a session-by-session guide at the back of this guide. We can start over and live a life beyond regret.This Participant's Guide is designed to be used with the Starting Over book. You can find the accompanying videos at startingoverbook.org.