A few months ago, I ran a short promo for author and newsletter subscriber Jim Roberts’ book, In Search of Maya.

This is the second book in Jim’s trilogy of dystopian rainforest thrillers, The Monkey State.

Since then, Jim and I have been chewing the fat on Whatsapp, chatting about all things related to writing, Michael Neill and the trials & tribulations of our beloved football teams Liverpool FC and Man Utd.

But a few weeks back, I got a different kind of message from Jim.

Here's what it said:

***

I'd be honoured if you'd be up for writing an epigraph for the 3rd book in the Monkey State trilogy.

It will be for Chapter 4," Back to Reality". The thrust of the chapter is Claude returning from the wild back to challenge the dictatorship. 

A sense of going back is interesting, given your story of returning to banking so you could play on that... Or maybe you can do a bit of nature of reality / 3ps infused / intuitive wisdom piece that you're seeing right now. Don't want to tie you in too much, though. The main thing is to avoid any human references!

Invent the name of the monkey to attribute the quote as you like (aside from being the name of a real life human). 

Meant to be fun and I won't be looking to edit.

***

What a treat!

I fired a message back to Jim saying that yes, I’d be delighted to write an epigraph for his third book. 

Then my mind started fizzing.

I LOVE the epigraphs in Jim’s books. They’re like bite-sized pearls of wisdom tailored for monkeys stuck in the corporate canopy. And each epigraph is cheekily credited to a “famous” monkey like Monkeavelli, Albus Thickfur or O. Rangash Tan.

I’m sure Jim had a blast coming up with these names.

I say that because I certainly did. My mind conjured up a whole troop of epigraph sages like Monke Guevara, Diego Monkedona, Freddie Monkery, Emmeline Monkhurst, Monkasso, Pablo Monkeybar, Elon Munkus and Monkbeth.

In the end, I went with the elder statesmonkey of the jungle:

Aristotail.

And for the epigraph itself, I plumped for two sentences that capture one of the biggest penny-dropping moments I’ve had in recent years. A penny-drop which also felt perfectly suited to Claude returning home from the wild.

Wait…what’s that?

You want to know which pearl of wisdom I shared in the epigraph?

Well, I’m not going to spill the beans here.

But if you’d like to see what I wrote (courtesy of my new furry friend Aristotail) then look no further than page 25 of Blood In the Green. 

As it happens, Jim's offering the kindle version for 99p until Monday. Even better, the first and second kindle books are currently free too. So for the next couple of days you can grab the full trilogy for less than a quid. 

If you'd like to get stuck into Jim's rainforest-based thrillers, here's where to go to find the goodies:

https://mybook.to/TheMonkeyStateTrilogy

To fulfilment,

Tom 

p.s. big congrats to Raquel who bagged herself a signed copy of The Monkey State after being the first reader to reply to my email yesterday