PtP Episode 2

After a few weeks of tweaking, fixing and buffing, Turkey, Surviving the Expats is off the blocks. Episode Two of the best of the blog contains all the juicy bits from the Turkey years. Here’s the blurb:

In 2009, Jack Scott and his civil partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed, what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettoes were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from, hated the country they’d come to and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj – ‘Tenko’ without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took them a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, eventually they found diamonds in the rough and roses among the weeds.

Welcome to Part Two of the mini-series which includes previously unpublished material together with Jack’s personal recommendations of the must-sees that Turkey has to offer visitors and residents alike.

Buy a Kindle edition from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and from all other Amazon stores worldwide. Don’t have a Kindle? No problem. Download the Kindle app from Amazon and read the book on your PC, smartphone or tablet. Alternatively, buy an e-Pub version from me directly and I get to keep all the dosh. The e-Pub format can be read on most non-Kindle readers (Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple). The e-books are priced at just £2.99, $3.99 and €3.50 – cheaper than a frozen pizza from Iceland (the shop, not the country).

PtP Episode 1 (313 x 500)Don’t forget to pick up Episode One – Turkey, the Raw Guide. Like Jack and Liam, they come as a pair.

Imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, married, middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. I chronicled our exploits with the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad in a blog for the whole world to ignore. Then came the book which became a critically acclaimed best seller. Its success opened out a whole new career for me, firstly as an author, and now as an indie publisher. Who'd have thought it? Certainly not me. In June 2012, we ended our Anatolian affair and paddled back to Britain on the evening tide, washing up in Norwich, a surprising city in eastern England, then to the wilds of Norfolk as the only gays in the village. I’m sometimes nostalgic for our encounters with the hopeless, the hapless and, yes, the happy go lucky. They gave me an unexpected tale to tell and for this I thank them.

13 thoughts on “Turkey, Surviving the Expats – Out Now!”

    1. Just e-books at the moment, I’m afraid. The sequel to the biography (due Summer this year) will be a paperback and maybe this little mini-series might be as well one day.

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  3. Great news Jack. I know you’ve sent me the first one but I haven’t managed to read it yet. Like Jared, I would love it if you could get these published in paperback too….I’d be straight out to buy them as soon as they hit the shops xx

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  5. Lol, Barry loved the ‘Tenko without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire.’
    Do you feel like you’re back in a real, normal Blighty world now or has your Bodrum experience changed (tainted / enhanced) you forever? We’ve not been back to the UK for so long but the ‘expat thing’ here still boggles our mind. We dip our toes in occasionally and have found a small handful of diamonds like you did…and then we run, run, run! After all these years, the safety in numbers thing still doesn’t make any sense to us. Maybe we’re the daft ones. 😉
    Julia

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    1. Not daft – heroic! Seriously, we loved every minute of our time in Turkey and wouldn’t swap it for all the cay in China. Turkey has changed us, and changed us for the better. It taught us to make do with so much less (we both had fat salaries and fat stress levels before), eat properly and enjoy what we have. Being a strong and tight couple really helped to get us through all the crap (from the expats in the main). A good sense of humour also helps. I find humour in everything. It keeps me sane 🙂 This is something I sense in you both as well. I can’t say that Norwich is it for good but it is it for now. We’re even thinking of buying because it’s so much cheaper than renting. But, I have a feeling that a few years down the road we might get itchy feet again. Inshallah!

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