A Rough Kind of Magic

About the Book

This is the story of a young man who has been told that he has a damaged heart and that he has to have a heart transplant. He was told that he had only a year to live unless he can find a donor. He decided to go to the Black Mountain where he finds his grandfather’s old farm. He wanted to stay there for whatever time he has got left, and he doesn’t intend to get involved with anyone. But then he met a white witch and her lovely granddaughter.

About the Author

Louise June James was born in the county of Staines Middlesex in October 1938 to middle aged parents who had already raised a family eighteen years before. The family moved to a cottage in the welsh hills during the war. Louise was educated at St. Michael’s Convent in Abergavenny. Writing since the age of twelve for a monthly Herb Magazine with small articles and poems. Louise’s childhood in a remote rural area stimulated a great imagination while living and playing in the countryside, developed a deep love of nature. When a teenage marriage failed she worked at several jobs in export and despatch offices. Her hobbies at that time were breeding and showing German Shepherd dogs, reading and painting. She married again in 1964, farming with her husband in the Black Mountains. Louise had three sons from this marriage and wrote her first book(not published) The marriage failed in 1980 she raised her teenaged sons unaided, managed a pub for four years then taking a course in Management Extension for the hotel trade. At this time her interest returned to writing poetry for pleasure and studying Astrology and the supernatural. Louise married Bryan James in 1989. His struggle to overcome the effects of a brain haemorrhage moved her to write a book for all who have come close to death or suffer some form of disability thus producing A rough kind of magic although it received favourable comments it was not published. Bryan and Louise moved to Sussex in 1990 where Louise worked in the book department at W.H.Smith where she was inspired to write The Blackberry Pickers in her spare time . Before it was completed Bryan was taken ill with M.E. and had to give up his job as farm manager. They moved back to Hereford where Louise has been able to continue writing and publishing several poems and her three books.