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Affairs of the Head
Affairs of the Head
Affairs of the Head
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Affairs of the Head

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Nervous, shy, plain, unfashionable, impecunious, ordinary? There are loads of people like that, but surely not hero material? Jayne Muffatt is all of these, seventeen years old, suppressed at home, ignored outside, and certainly no hero when she turns up for her first job after an undistinguished school career.

Yet she overcomes her mother, who wants her to marry a sinister evangelist with a secret and an agenda, her boss, whose firm makes wonderful medical equipment but with a terrifying dark side, a county court which wants to imprison her for arson and housebreaking and even a tabloid newspaper, portraying her as ‘the computer sex girl’. This follows an unexpected encounter with her boss’s computer, 'borrowed' to verify suspicions held by her and her geeky friend Jon Bacon.

Jayne has to survive a car chase, a fire, a coma, a court case, a discovery which pulls down the shutters on a hoped-for romance, a complete reversal of her own long-held opinions, an attempt to scramble her brain and the loss of Jon. She discovers talents she never suspected when she learns to use her boss’s computer to search her own and other people’s minds. In the final chapters, she uses her abilities in a dramatic rescue, though mixed with tragedy.

Through all this journey of self-discovery, Jayne finds a resilience and resourcefulness she never thought she had, and grows from a shy and downtrodden teenager into a worthy, if not always perfect hero.

This is a clearly constructed, well-paced and often humorous story, for young people who don’t fit the usual image and prefer heroes who don’t, and for those of us who remember that we were like that too.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherTony Compton
Release dateMar 15, 2017
ISBN9781370088379
Affairs of the Head
Author

Tony Compton

I was born and brought up in the New Forest, Hampshire, UK. After school at what is now Brockenhurst College, and Cambridge University, I worked briefly on colour TV cameras with the Marconi Company in Essex, then taught school physics there and in Hertfordshire. I moved on to electronics, specializing in the medical field as a lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire (formerly Hatfield Polytechnic), along with some design consultancy. I retired with my wife Elisabeth to Hexham, Northumberland, in 2006, from where we visit our three children and five grandchildren as often as we can.Since then I have continued my other interests of classical music, particularly choral and organ, photography, natural history and theology (from a liberal/progressive standpoint). I also assist Elisabeth in running a Fairtrade stall. Elisabeth took the photo while we were on a walk in Northumberland, our other joint activity.My writing stems from a desire to explore how science and technology affect people, their beliefs and their lives, as much as the subjects themselves, though I read New Scientist regularly to keep up to date.

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    Affairs of the Head - Tony Compton

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