HAILSHAM-BASED AUTHOR RELEASES TOPICAL NOVEL

Life revolves around coincidences. It’s late at night, November 1994, a chance meeting between strangers at an airport. A woman and four children need to travel two hundred miles, a military man, traveling home to his wife alone. He offers to give her a lift and she accepts. An hour later, two children asleep on the back seat top and tail, two asleep in the footwells, she tells him how she has escaped from an abusive relationship in Iran. The seed for the book, The Chain Diaries was sowed.

Twenty-five years later, local author Steve Scarlett, used that seed to create a screenplay titled ‘A Million Miles’, and over the course of the next eighteen months, including lockdown, Steve novelised the screenplay and the first draft of the book was ready in November 2021.

The Chain Diaries centres around Angie, an English housewife and her husband Ben, an Iranian national working at the Iranian Embassy in London. They live in an affluent area of the city with their three young boys. While Angie visits her recently widowed father in Plymouth, Ben is linked to a political killing and later flees to Iran taking the boys with him. Angie enlists the help of her father, Eddie, and Tony, both ex-Royal Marines and they devise a plan to bring the boys home.

In an attempt to retrieve the boys, Angie, falls foul of Iran’s ‘Morality Police’ in a similar manner to that of Masha Amini who died recently after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly. In ‘The Chain Diaries’, the morality police are called The Pasdaran, a section of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard responsible for upholding Islamic values. Angie is also held in the notorious Evin prison where Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe recently found herself.

The book is self-published, and apart from the proofreading and the actual printing, there is no part of the book’s publication process that Steve did not complete himself. The book is available on Amazon in both paperback format and Kindle. It’s also available from Steve directly and contact should be made through www.stevescarlett.co.uk.