You could knock me over with a feather boa. Fifteen months after Perking the Pansies, Jack and Liam move to Turkey first hit the shelves, it’s back at the top of the Amazon UK charts. To be number one in LGBT Travel is fabulous. To be in the top twenty for all travel books about Turkey is remarkable (in the company of titles from the Rough Guide, Lonely Planet and Marco Polo). I’ve now had more chart re-entries than Elvis and I’m chuffed. Thank you.

Perking_the_Pansies

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. Iā€™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.

22 thoughts on “Jack in the Book”

  4. Brilliant Jack!! Your faithful followers are proud of you! The book gave me such an intimate look into the strange world of expat Turkey, plus a very poignant glimpse into the lives of the Turkish people, too… Loved it.

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