Please join me in congratulating Alan Parry on the launch of coming-of-age story, Peeling Apples (Dark Winter Press)
Peeling Apples – Alan Parry
Martyn is ten years old, navigating a world of routines and quiet mysteries. His days unfold between school, his Nana Mavis’s small, familiar house, and the blurred presence of his overworked parents. But it’s the house next door that draws his attention, the one with the overgrown garden, the untidy porch, and Mrs. Joyce, a woman who seems set apart from everything and everyone.
At first, she is an oddity, a distant neighbour glimpsed through gaps in the fence. But when an accident leads to an unexpected encounter, Martyn is pulled into her world of cacti in teacups, peeling apples in perfect spirals, and slow, thoughtful conversations that stretch beyond what he understands. In her quiet company, he finds a space unlike any other, a friendship that grows in the silences between them.
Yet, the things adults don’t say begin to press in: unspoken worries, absences that lengthen, a door that one day remains closed. In the face of change he cannot control, Martyn must learn what it means to hold onto something even as it slips away.
Peeling Apples is a meditation on childhood, loss, and the quiet imprints people leave on each other’s lives. Lyrical and intimate, it captures the bittersweet moment when a boy begins to understand the weight and inevitability of love.
Patricia M Osborne 