ISBN: 978-1911249986  Huge Jam 2023

The Burnt Roses

Loneliness is a killer, so people have said... and Martha is lonely, even though she sees familiar faces everywhere. Call it a neurological quirk. She has to hold down tricky conversations with jostling, self-important dollar bills, go lip-to-lip with a Hollywood icon, and ride a warhorse with a stiff and spectacular General, all within the same square mile.
   Neil Baker doesn’t even have quirks to break through his monotonous existence but don’t let us the readers be guilty of overlooking him too. Though exhaustion makes his soul invisible.
   Martha and Neil don't meet. But they have a common denominator in Aaron, a quiet, sensitive and ardently faithful boy, who doesn’t fit in either – despite his loving family and his prayers – and who feels the full force of the dramas that encircle him.   

   In this, the very first novel he committed to paper, and now being published for the first time, Jon Ferguson paints a transatlantic, era-crossing world of pain and humour that has a lot in common with classics such as Under Milkwood and Ulysses while retaining his modern American voice. Imagine Holden Caulfield writing To the Lighthouse.A stretch too far? Open this book and let it take you there.

ISBN: 978-1916604094  Huge Jam 2023

Don't Bullshit Me Daddy

How do birds see the world? Do they have a totally different way of experiencing life than humans do? Are they stoic? Is their threshold of pain and loneliness completely different from ours?
Can a bird die of a broken heart?
   'In case you haven’t figured it out, what I’m trying to say is that when I was six years old and had a guinea pig, I didn’t ask any of these kinds of questions. The guinea pig was just a damn guinea pig and I petted it and fed it and cleaned its cage, but I sure as hell didn’t worry about a zillion ramifications of its mental condition. I’m trying to say that with age – in my case from six to sixteen – the world has become a whole lot more complicated.'
   After witnessing the death of her mother at the age of eight, life is never going to be simple for Laura Winger... but, from Disneyland to Venice, her dad succeeds in making it a whole lot easier – while he can.
   If reading Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye moved you because of the narrator's unease with childhood transitioning to adolescence, Ferguson's narrator in Don't Bullshit Me Daddy – 16-year-old Laura Winger – will move you to embrace the inescapable rite of passage into old age and certain mortality. Yes, there are still some 'phonies' out there, but this novel – rather than being about the loss of innocence – affirms that innocence exists in everyone.

ISBN: 978-1911249900  Huge Jam 2022

The Flood

Philip Papp cuts a sad version of Michelangelo’s David. But that doesn't seem to matter post-deluge and he manages to attract a small crowd of spectators, most days, from his first-floor window.

   After the flood, Betty Swain's old, arthritic fingers are free to work their magic with impunity and (bless her heart) for no ixed fee. Bereft, bemused widowers are happy to pay her a fair rate. Ask Bill the policeman.

   Who sent the mysterious flood? Decided which people would perish? Did all ambition, judgement, and censure recede and evaporate with it?

   Jon Ferguson's novel holds a mirror up to a West that's all but saturated with covetousness, media, and law enforcement. Humorous and joyful, with fat droplets of pathos...is it a utopian or dystopian vision?

   ... The thing is, your need to judge and then pigeonhole might not even survive the narrative.

ISBN: 978-1911249955  Huge Jam 2022

Adam's Cane

"I didn’t see my father again until the morgue yesterday. He looked all right, a little pinker and puffier than usual. Then they closed the lid." For Adam Lamb, this loss is definitely not an existentialist experience. Instead, the funeral guests - who slowly drift in to a service where the pastor’s only role is to keep his mouth shut and let the music play - open the lid on his dad’s own philosophy. In a tender moment, with the friends, ex-lovers, and colleagues of the late Charley Lamb raising a drink and sharing memories, Adam experiences the peeling back of accumulated years.

   …as the evening wore on, all these people around the table, though at least a half a century old – except Barbara Chardon and myself – started looking much younger. I began seeing their faces as if they were the ages they were when all these things happened. Lou-Lou was seventeen. Isabella was twenty-five. Pittet and Danny Dapper were cruising through their forties and fifties. And I was seeing my father through the years after he moved to Switzerland and made a life for himself – both before and after he made me.   

    But the life-changing surprise for him isn’t his dad’s colourful past, or the momentary shift in time and space. It’s connected to the hand that gently touches his elbow and escorts him to the cemetery, as the moon hangs like a streetlamp over the Alps.

ISBN: 978-1739182946  Huge Jam 2022

The Last Day Forever

A metaphysical story filled with love, pathos, philosophy, humanity and...a little bit of take-with-a-pinch-of-salt history.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EDITION IS POCKET-SIZED (6x4 inches). Ideal as a stocking filler for the Tristan or Iseult in your life!

   The judge looks around the wall-less room. “So let me introduce you to the last two jurors, Tristan. I’ve got your name now. (Same Elvis smile.) In the last

chair there in the white toga is ‘Fluto’. That’s what we call him anyway. He pretty much stopped talking centuries ago, but he likes to play the flute. He lived

in Greece shortly before Plato and Aristotle and all their buddies. He said he’s pissed off because he spent fifteen years of his life breaking his back and

getting calluses all over his hands building the damn Parthenon and nobody thanked him. Then he said Plato started strolling around talking all kinds of

nonsense and he – Plato – became world [effin’] famous, and he – Fluto - is still a nobody. He’s still got a chip on his shoulder. Can’t really blame the sonuvabitch. He claims that Plato screwed up the world more than anybody else with all his ideas about the intangible world being the real world and all that crap. He says he did all the work with his hands and Plato shows up babbling that things that

you can touch and see aren’t real and that only spiritual shit is real. Fluto says that messed up the world forever, right Fluto?”

   Fluto wiggles in his chair and takes out a wooden flute. He plays a few notes of the Beatles song Let It Be. Then he puts his flute back in a deep toga pocket.

   “That’s his way of saying he agrees with me.”

   “But what about all this?” I ask.  “Where we are here? Is this spiritual or material, tangible or intangible...real or unreal?”

   San Antonio seems to like my questions.

ISBN: 978-1911249894  Huge Jam 2022

Foster's Depression

Not a word in 2004 ran the (fictional) San Fransisco Chronicle's headline. By his own public admission, for 18 months Ted Foster “rarely rotated his noggin left or right because there was nothing it wanted to look at”.
   But what had put him into this catatonic stupor? Seems we could be about to find out... “On Larry King Live," he writes in chapter one, "I only had about forty-five minutes and he kept changing the subject to keep his ratings up. But now I’ve got a book. I can say whatever I want to say for as long as I want to say it...” And it turns out it’s not his marriage, it’s notthat he’s entered his fifties, it’s not insane world events…It's something much smaller...

   Jon Ferguson has written a novel rich in character, philosophy and humour, that engages the reader to the extent that you will want Ted Foster to keep on “pecking out” his life story. From page one the book poses a question about “who the loonies are”: Foster’s pretty sure it’s not him...

ISBN: 978-1911249979  Huge Jam 2022

The Anthropologist

To say that Professor Lenny Fuller has an irreverent attitude to dusty, unimaginative, uninspiring academia is an understatement. But he carries on handing out his A+ grades to new tranches of anthropology students, one eye set on his students' horizons and the other on his imminent retirement. Meanwhile the university hierarchy has its eyes set on him. So, when he swaps his staid corduroys for hip hop polyester and starts lecturing in explicit rap, the powers-that-be are ready to swoop.
   His secretary's son (described by author John Coetzee - Pulitzer and Booker Prize winner) as "a superb creation") finds society looks different when he's dressed for the day in Fuller's cords, in a surprisingly ground shifting anthropological experiment. Or is it therapy?
   In any case, Lenny Fuller is too preoccupied with a more domestic mystery to worry about his changing employment status. A rather intimate mystery, possibly involving Julia Roberts, that gets solved with the help of Juan, the Mexican campus gardener.

ISBN: 978-1739182960  Huge Jam 2022

Three Forgotten Tales

Jon Ferguson’s Three Forgotten Tales tenderly rewrite the story of Jesus: his life, crucifixion, and legacy. 
   Written mainly around imagined conversations spanning the decades between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, their son God, God's wife Naomi, and an array of characters mostly mythical and mystical who cross 2000 years, it contains breathtaking descriptions of, and insights into, power, nature and — most of all — perfect love.
   If you can open your mind, then these three connected tales will leave you deeply moved and wondering at the immensity of the universe. (Though it is possible  readers could be offended by content that attributes a loving and (NOTE) consummated relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, many Christian readers have commented on how the portrayal of Jesus captures the immensity of his love for all humans and his own humanity in a vivid, tangible and moving way.)
   Also published in three separate volumes as a series, this contains the novels Jesus & Mary, Mary & God and God & Naomi.

But tell me, my dear friend… Have you ever felt great joy?

Yes… once … twice… a few times.

And didn’t one moment of supreme joy make it all worthwhile?

That is possible Jesus…

As he said this, the old man’s eyes closed. Jesus took his hand, bent forward, and kissed it. As he was about to set the hand back on the old man’s chest, he felt it turning cold. He held it gently – between his two warm hands – as the old man’s head fell to the side.

ISBN: 978-1916604001  Huge Jam 2023

The Old Man and the Stone

Expanding on the Fergusonian universe, often explored in his fiction titles, Jon Ferguson shares his musings on subjects including life, death, the media, good wine, culture, love, Faulkner, loneliness, Haydn, nature, human nature and more. In the Kindle edition only, his words are accompanied by the photos that have been enjoyed by followers of his Facebook page. Read in order these musings also provide a moving, overarching narrative about love, ageing and fate. Humour abounds, as always.