Lydias Literary Lowdown with Lydia Aswolf

Reading David's work is like having a gourmet nine course feast...interviewing him will be but an extra dessert course!

Thirty years working for small companies, middle-sized companies, large companies, in Britain, in France, in Germany, owned by larger than life owners or anonymous shareholders from Europe, the States, even in one
glorious, technicolor experience, by a larger-than life South African, have deeply ingrained in me a sense of what makes business tick, what makes it lurch along or fall, what makes it create or destroy.


Again and again, I’ve been the enthralled if not appalled spectator of the loyalties, noble and corrupt, the betrayals, the manipulations, the subversions that mark the relationships between the men and women whose
work drives businesses or whose leadership takes them to success or failure. I’ve seen that the failures, personal or corporate, far outnumber the successes. And I’ve been the victim or the beneficiary of both – and much more often the victim.

But way back before all this started, I’d been a student of language – above all French and Italian – and of great novels written in a number of them, to say nothing of my own. And in all that 30 years of experience of rough and tumble of business, I’ve always felt there was material here to turn into novels not yet written, novels that might speak to people out there precisely because they talk about experiences they recognise as their own.


Does the formula work? I don’t know. The first attempt is nearly ready for release, the second is far advanced. There will come a time when I have screw up my courage and let them go and see where they take me. And all my experience of watching heights scaled and depths plunged will, at that stage, no doubt be more than ever necessary to me.