You can give your loved one the perfect Valentine's Day gift - "The Kiss" by Jefferson Galt - for Kindle or Kindle Reader for phones, tablets and PCs - and it won't cost you a penny or a cent.
No Purchase Necessary.
Jefferson Galt's novel, "The Kiss" is the first in his "Pete, Fay, Love trilogy, a love story spanning fifty years.
Pete and Fay are both far from home, in a strange town and they happen to walk into the same bar. They meet and, over time, fall in love. But life gets in the way and, after several years, they have to part.
But they never stop loving each other.
"The Kiss" is their story, as they tell it to friends, their storytelling intertwined, and to themselves and - even - to their memories of each other. And it's the stories of their lives after the breakup, against the background of their enduring love.
Bitter-sweet with a fascinating combination of heroic love and Hollywood ending, "The Kiss" is a story of the undying love of two people forced apart by circumstances beyond their control.
EXTRACT
I'm old now. At school, when I was maybe six or seven years old, the usual question was trotted out. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" The same old answers cropped up: fireman, policeman and, from those hoping to curry favour, teacher. I said 96. Last week, I was 96.
Once, long ago, I told someone, a woman, my woman, Fay, that I wouldn't die until I was old, but that when I did, I wanted to be burned in an old cardboard box to save on trees and my ashes put into a coffee jar – specifically a Nescafé Blend 37 jar - and the jar tossed into the South China Sea. I've kept an empty Blend 37 jar in the house in case of emergency but I don't have the woman any more, haven't had her for more than 40 years. Still remember like it was yesterday the moment she left. I don't bother keeping an old cardboard box: the undertaker can use one that someone else's smart, expensive and ecologically dubious coffin was delivered in.
Now, here I am, my feet in the sand watching the sun rise over the South China Sea.
I've done this every morning for the past, oh, ten years or so, even since I left town, left the flat we had shared all those years ago, although I still own it, still have it cleaned and maintained, still keep a car there and have that looked after, too. I go back when the weather is too bad to stay here in my little hideaway.
It was time to move on, I had thought some time ago. But I had no idea where to move on to.
All my life, I had worked on the assumption that inactivity led to atrophy. When I was travelling, I always kept moving, always getting closer to my destination. Now it seemed right. I left the flat and now I live on the edge of the South China Sea. I am as close to my final destination as I can get without actually being there.
For the past 50 years or so, this country has been my home, the place I was once happy, even if only for a short while. It's impossible to leave. Maybe she'll come. I've left a note on the door of the fridge with the address here, just in case. And a set of car keys on the dining room table.
The sun is climbing a little higher now. Sunrise and sunset in the tropics are a constant source of wonder. Every day it's like visiting a new art gallery where some huge hand paints the most glorious - and sometimes bizarrely abstract - rendering of a perfect skyscape.
When the sun rises out of the sea, seemingly right on the horizon and not millions of miles away, it first teases by colouring the wisps of cloud, then it hints by showing its surrounding halo, then it reveals the tiniest part of itself like the very tip of the tongue being stuck out playfully, then it speeds up a little, more of it becoming visible then, when it is half way out, it suddenly snaps free of the horizon, like a bauble on the end of a piece of taught elastic when it's released, and shoots up high into the sky.
Every morning, before it is light, I get up, make a cup of Blend 37 instant coffee, pull on a pair of frankly awful shorts and walk to my chair on the beach, slip my bare feet into the sand - hoping nothing venomous is hiding in the same place - and wait. The sun breathes life into me. The cold in my old bones is gradually displaced as the sun warms me through. Within an hour, it will be too hot to sit like this. I'll need a hat and a shirt so I don't dry out under the natural heat-lamp overhead. But first, it's time to go for a paddle.
The sand is firm where it's wet and it's a gentle slope out to further than I can walk without having to start to swim as the water comes up to my chin. For someone who wants to be tossed into the sea when he's dead, I have an irrational fear of water closing over my head. No doubt some expensive research will be needed to make some psychologist's name into a household word before anyone can explain that one. Here's my theory: when I'm dead, I'll be free of all pain and fear so I might as well then do something I wouldn't dare do in life. Someone once said I'd be a risk taker all my life; my guess is that I'm planning to take one more risk after it's ended.
So, 96. 96 and four days, actually. Of course, except for my son no one I now know even knows my birthday so it passed unnoticed except by a wry smile on my face as I remembered that day in school. Do I feel grown up? I'm letting the sand run between my toes and going for a paddle in a warm, blue sea. Is that grown up? Will I feel more grown up when I'm about to be 97? Somehow I don't think so. It's the taking of delight in new things that's the essence of youth, I've decided. Every sunrise is a new day and so taking delight in that is the way to stay forever young.
Staying young. Ha! There was a dinner party with Fay when we were still happy and one of our friends who had to hide his girlfriend away when one of his relatives came to stay. She, the relative, was in her mid fifties - about the same age as me, but looking - I think I can say this politely - somewhat worn. She had been a career woman, a series of high-powered but not very well paid jobs. Now retired, she was - perhaps - thinking that it would have been nice to have found a mate, to have someone in the background for times like these, someone to have as a dinner date. She asked me how I stayed so young. I laughed and looked at my woman, beautiful, intelligent, sexy - and young - and said "never have a girlfriend more than 25 years old."
Looking back, that comment might have been the germ that ultimately killed our relationship for when she was 25, Fay told me she was leaving, that at 25 she needed to prepare for life after me, to find someone nearer her own age, that she wanted to grow old with someone.
She didn't realise, then, that she was paraphrasing from a poem - a terrible poem - I had written when she had had a previous wobbly. In that poem I had said "you want to grow old with someone, not grow with someone old."
-----------------
The Pete, Fay, Love trilogy is available in paperback and in e-book format for Kindle and Kindle Reader (for Apple's iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, Blackberry and PC / Mac computers.)
The trilogy consists of
PB
The Kiss
Pete, Fay, Love (The Kiss and The Letters That We Wrote in one volume)
The Things That I Can't Say
e-B
The Kiss
The Letters That We Wrote
The Things That I Can't Say
Jefferson Galt said
"I am delighted that we can offer The Kiss in this way. It's a story of selfless love and devotion over decades; of hope and a lesson that, in ways we cannot imagine, life generally turns out OK in the end."
For full information and links for the free offer, see http://www.jeffersongalt.com
Notes to editors:
1. The Kiss is free on 11/12/13/14 February 2011 US Pacific time.
2. No purchase is necessary
3. It is not necessary to own or have access to a Kindle device.
4. the book can be given as a gift
*Trade marks acknowledged*
# # #
Jefferson Galt is an author.
His published books include
PB
The Kiss
Pete, Fay, Love (The Kiss and The Letters That We Wrote in one volume)
The Things That I Can't Say
e-B
The Kiss
The Letters That We Wrote
The Things That I Can't Say
