If You Were Leader of the Whole World, What Would Be the First Thing You Would Do?" - Andrew Crofts
It started just before Christmas
2018 with an email from a Dutch publisher and author called Geert Kimpen, informing me that his client was looking for a ghostwriter to help him write a
“thriller-like book about the return of the Messiah” and asking if I would be
interested. I was.
On the 3rd of January
2019 I met Martin Van Es at the Stafford Hotel in St James’s, tucked away in a
mews behind the Ritz, and listened to an outpouring of ideas about how mankind
needed to adapt if we were to avoid self-destruction.
“If you were the leader of the whole
world,” he asked at one point, “what would be the first thing that you would
do?”
Good question.
“If Jesus was to reappear on Earth
to give mankind one more chance to save themselves,” he continued, “what do you
think would happen?”
Another good question.
I was hooked.
Martin had read my novel “Secrets
of the Italian Gardener”, and wanted his story written in a similar style.
In March I travelled, along with
Geert Kimpen, to the Dutch island of Terschelling, where Martin and his son own
an events company and Martin has a house. For several days we sat in beach
restaurants and bicycled around the island, all the time talking about the story
and the characters and how mankind could be saved if we had one unifying leader
rather than the divisive, nationalistic bunch that we have now. A strong friendship was formed and Martin generously suggested that I might be given equal billing as a co-author, rather than my usual, invisible, ghost status.
On June 4th 2020, despite
the arrival of exactly the sort of global crisis we had been talking about and imagining,
the book, entitled “Call Me Joe” is being published simultaneously in Dutch by
Geert and in English by RedDoor Press and the first advanced review has appeared
in Midwest Book Review:
“Readers who enjoy apocalyptic
stories that focus on more than just physical and psychological survival alone
will delight in the social, political, and spiritual entanglements ……. An involving,
compelling read right up to the conclusion and a call for radical
re-envisioning of mankind’s choices and social and political structures for the
sake of the planet’s survival.”
Comments