Welcome! I'm Andrew Tonks

About Me

This is the first book of a series of novels following Danl and Tini Rook through their quest to obtain an answer to their private tradgedy which proves to be a part of something much wider.My name is Andrew Tonks. My wife and I have lived in Birmingham, U.K., for about 30 years now although neither of us came from a city environment.
I was born into a coal mining community in Shirebrook, Derbyshire. Although in the mid 1950’s the housing in which we lived was probably already a century old, the street on which we lived, with my grandparents, had cobblestones as did the market place. Without further details it gave me a contemporary empathy with some of the less salubrious parts of Charles Dickens. However, shielded from the harsher realities of the hardness of life and death in such a mining community by, a loving family  and that bond a community of people struggling against the same difficulties develop. A strong sense of empathy, an unselfish regard for the circumstances of others and a desire to help each other. Values that I still carry with me. I could never look back at that time with embarrassment or awkwardness. My family moved to a town called Ollerton in Sherwood Forest, North Nottinghamshire, an area called the Dukeries due to the locality of Four Ducal seats.
Like Shirebrook, Ollerton was a mining community and is where I lived for the next 17 years. An area that I still love and revisit regularly, although only a little coal is mined now at the last colliery open in the area.