Brendan Gisby's Page

The Island of Whispers

I began to write the book shortly after attending the centenary celebrations of the Forth Bridge in 1990, when I had some time on my hands. I wanted to produce something which could be compared with ‘Watership Down’, but which would be set in my own territory. I completed the first three parts quite quickly, but I had to stop at that point because of business commitments. It was not until 2009, almost twenty years later, that I picked up the manuscript again and completed the final two parts.

The finished book really is like ‘Watership Down’, but with a difference. The difference is that there are no cuddly rabbits. Just rats. They live on the little island that's tucked under the Forth Railway Bridge. They've been there for centuries. Then a group of them attempts to flee to the mainland. They just happen to go in the middle of the bridge's centenary celebrations ...

Find out more at this link.

The Olive Branch

Back in 1975, there were reports in the press of a warming in relations between the Republic of China and the USSR. I was in my mid-twenties at the time, and I was further right than Attila the Hun. Rather naively, I wanted to write a novel that would act as a warning of the threat to the West that such an amelioration in relations could pose. Called ‘The Olive Branch’, to signify the metaphorical token of peace that was exchanged between Peking and the Kremlin, and set a few years in the future, the novel relates what might have happened if the two Communist giants combined and colluded to dominate the world.

When I revisited the manuscript more than thirty years later, I was more than pleasantly surprised. I realised that I was reading a thriller and not the dense political diatribe that I thought I had written. By the time I reached the end of it, I was delighted and exhilarated by the writing, and I actually turned breathlessly to the final chapter. I enjoyed it very much. I hope you do, too.