John Uttley is back in his favoured territory, north of the Ribble, in green pastures, and south in cabbage fields. This time, he’s changed the characters.

Young lovers many decades ago, Sheila and Jim meet up again in old age after the death of their spouses. Their marriages had been good ones. Sheila has a large family to prove it. Jim has only haunting memories.

Their mourning is genuine but they both still have a few years left before the Grim Reaper will call.

Can they make the most of them together?

They befriend a young pair of lovers whose relationship is doomed to fail.

Oldies and youngsters help each other navigate their way through.

Much has changed but more has stayed the same.

John Uttley was born in Lancashire just as the war was ending. Grammar school educated there, he read Physics at Oxford before embarking on a long career with the CEGB and National Grid Group. He was Finance Director there at the time of the miners’ strike, the Sizewell Inquiry and privatisation, receiving an OBE in 1991.

Shortly afterwards, he suffered his fifteen minutes of fame when he publicly gave a dividend to charity in the middle of the fat cat furore. Following this, he took an external London degree in Divinity while acting as chairman of numerous smaller companies, both
UK and US based.

He is married to Janet, living just north of London. Over the last fifteen years, he has published The Unholy Trinity trilogy, a family saga. And now, as an octogenarian, he has written this stand-alone novel, The End of the Line, a celebration of lives still being lived
to the full as the Grim Reaper makes his plans.