A former lecturer at Stroud College has fulfilled a lifelong ambition by publishing his debut novel.
John Treweek spent much of his career working in further education at Stroud College.
“I began there as a lecturer and later looked after the Adult Education programme the college provided across the south of the county,” said John.
“I really enjoyed working in Stroud, though it was always my ambition to write novels and this had to wait until I retired.”
John’s debut novel, Secrets of the Scrolls, is set in Scotland and Italy and follows the coming-of-age story of a young archaeologist called Jeannie.
While still at school, Jeannie discovers that she has a Native North American great-great-grandmother. As part of a social history project, she is able to uncover a great deal about her Scottish ancestry, but finds out virtually nothing about her mysterious great-great-grandmother.
Years later, Jeannie is working as an archaeologist at a villa being excavated in the Bay of Naples when she hears about a hidden set of scrolls written by a slave-scribe.
The circumstances in which the scrolls were written and hidden lead Jeannie to imagine that the slave-scribe could speak for all the unheard and unheard-of people – people like her great-great-grandmother, about whom she otherwise knows almost nothing.
After obtaining and reading the scrolls, Jeannie sets out to track down the slave-scribe in Rome, where he escaped and lived as a free man.
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” said John. “There’s a slow-to-ignite romance and a murder mystery, but to say more would be a spoiler.”
Secrets of the Scrolls is available from Borderless Books.
