"It was as if the wool had become all of the strands of his life, and those lifelines, not amounting to much but full of potential, were forming into something much more worthwhile, and much more beautiful, after they had been given a new form with the knitting needles."
Inspired by the poems written by his coal miner father, and taking its name and theme from one of them, “The Knitter” is a celebration of one man’s wisdom, talent and influence. The book should be considered a “fictionalised” memoir – some parts are literally true, some are a close cousin of real events and some have been imagined from stories told, or from the poems written by the author's father. In trying to remain true to the spirit and feeling of what it describes rather than the bare facts, The Knitter succeeds in getting closer to some real and more lasting truths than many biographies manage to achieve. It shows us the importance of the people around us in helping make sense of our lives and how we can all make a real, lasting difference. It is in the connected strands running through the book that “The Knitter” becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Funny, sad and wise, the book works as a collection of short stories. However, it’s real impact lies in being a memoir that may just leave you wanting to be a better person for having read it. Find out more about The Knitter, and the poems that inspired it, at www.theknitterbook.com
The author was born in 1952 in the small village of Calderbank in central Scotland, the second eldest of four in a fairly typical working class Catholic family. After taking a degree in Computer Science, he has spent most of his life working for major corporations, and in various management consulting roles.
The Knitter is his first book - find out more about it, and the poems that inspired it at www.theknitterbook.com
“She, with some infernal magic rife,
Entwined her needles with my passing life.”
From the poem “The Knitter”
Some early reviews of the book:
“Even minor characters……are beautifully drawn and memorable”
“The Author has a talent for making the most minor, everyday event captivating to the reader”
“….reminded me very much of "Angela's Ashes”……. It also reminded me of William MacIlvanney's novel Docherty"
”…The book is so well written that it would be impossible not to connect with it.”
A short extract from “The Knitter”:
"It was one of the coldest nights so far, of what had already been a freezing winter. There was a happy, plump faced full moon, and the snow was falling outside in that way where it seemed to be suspended, just floating in the air, too light to bother itself with something as insignificant as gravity.
The night was lit with a kind of low, eerie glow that made it feel more like late afternoon. Everyone else was in bed, but Johnnie was on his chair reading a book and gently puffing on the end of his pipe. There was still plenty of life left in the fire, and Maggie came in from the kitchen and snuggled into her chair – hers because it was in the warmest position in the room. She lifted one ball of wool from a neat pile of different colours sitting by her side, took the knitting needles propped against the chair, and, without any pause for thought, started casting on the stitches for her latest masterpiece.
Johnnie looked over. The start was the bit that fascinated him. It always looked the same, no matter what the final outcome. A simple row of stitches appeared on one needle, with no way of predicting what they would grow into. He never once asked her of course; that would have been too easy. As he watched the thick, light brown wool fill up the whole length of the left-hand needle, he couldn’t help but marvel at Maggie. He was supposed to be the creative one, the intelligent one, the one who could put his hand to anything. Music, art, poetry – you name it, Johnnie’s the man! But he was in awe of Maggie’s knitting. He had tried it once when he was in on his own, and finished by ripping out the bedraggled stitches less than half way into the cast-on, silently cursing under his breath. And there she was, fingers a blur as she eased into her next creation on autopilot.
“So what is it going to be? It’s surely too wide for socks, and probably too wide for a scarf”, he thought to himself.
He soon settled for a cardigan. “Maybe it’s for me – it looks like my colours.”
Johnnie sat puffing his pipe, half staring at Maggie and half staring past her, just thinking. As she moved on through the rows, seamlessly blending new colours with the original brown, her mind wandered off as usual, just sailing through the wee things she had been thinking about lately. Her thoughts shared the same space in the room as Johnnie’s, oblivious to each other’s existence, suspended in the air like the snowflakes outside.