Ebook available (pay what you like)
Wasted Years started life in 2004, and for a long time on this blog was known as The Serial Novel, as I was sending it a chapter at a time to friend T every month or two. That was partly so she didn’t have to wait indefinitely for me to finish it and partly to make sure I kept going. I finished it in 2010, a triumphant day tinged with sadness – I’d grown to love my main characters and I knew I was going to miss them.
Allow me to introduce you to the main characters:
West Yorkshire, 1988: Helena Robertshaw is starting out as an accountant and finding it hard to reconcile that with her vegetarian peacenik boyfriend who’s doing a PhD in politics. She thinks she’s grown up since she was impressed by his principles at eighteen, and as the daughter of a bus driver and a housewife she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t work towards buying herself a slice of the good life if she’s given the chance.
Matthew Armitage is a year older than Helena, also a trainee accountant but not as dazzled by the glamour of big business. For a while he distracts himself with other things, but there’s only so many eligible young women to work his way through, even in a big firm like the one he and Helena work for. He wants more from life, even if more means less depending on your point of view.
Wasted Years spends 16 years with Matthew and Helena, where priorities change, mistakes are made, and their friendship is the only constant. Join them on the journey as they discover that not all love is true, money isn’t everything, and sometimes what you need is right in front of you if you’d only open your eyes.
How to obtain the ebook
You can download it as a pdf under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence then pay what you like (yes, that includes paying nothing). If you do feel like contributing to my tea, biscuit and biro fund, use this button to take you to my Ko-fi page:
If you’ve read the book, feel free to leave a comment saying why you did or didn’t enjoy it, or linking to your review of it.
The tip-tap of monkey keyboards 
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