FOMITE

Guilt and the need to repent drive the antiheroes in A Day in the Life as reclusive Professor Emeritus George Gordon Bombazine rises at dawn on his seventieth birthday, he plans to kill himself that night. He lives with his old dog Argos; his wife has left him for another professor; his estranged son and sister despises him, and he's been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He knows precisely the time and place he'll suicide, yet hopes that something might happen today to make him want to go on living. As the day progresses, things do happen—sex, love, friendship, forgiveness, even a chance for a movie screenplay. But do they happen in time, and will they be enough?

 

About the Author

Tom Walker has written hundreds of magazine features, profiles, short stories, and one previous book, Banking on Tradition (2000). Formerly the editor of SA: The Magazine of San Antonio and two airline magazines (Southwest and Continental), he is currently writing the histories of two dynasties dating back to the Norman Invasion. Walker lives in San Antonio with his artist wife Lila and their Alaskan Malamute rescue dog Gypsy.

 

Praise

“With the irascible, profane, and fascinating character George Gordon Bombazine, Tom Walker's A Day in the Life gives us an academic to stand alongside such memorable college professors as those created by Kingsley Amis and Michael Chabon. Through his encounters and reflections over the course of one day, the novel compellingly examines not just its main character but also the nature of dying...and of living, too. Bombazine and A Day in the Life will resonate in my mind for days to come."

—William Merrill, short story author, Amazon Vine Program book reviewer

 

"Engagingly structured, fast paced, laced with humor and horror, as well as many well chosen - often, delightful - contemporary and classic allusions, A Day in the Life offers a fresh take not only on dysfunctional families but also on dysfunctional individuals. Even before realizing that all these gifts awaited me, the introduction early in the first chapter of a major character, Argos, an Alaskan malamute, hooked me."

—Coleen Grissom, author of A Novel Approach To Life and The World According To Coleen