The Dream Factory: Ghosts

When a clandestine agency abducts his parents, a young boy escapes to the family’s remote beach hideaway. But as love blossoms on the beach, chaos overruns his village, and he eventually returns to find that all hope is not lost. An uplifting and illuminating experience that is as visual as it is visceral, John Simes delivers a total reading experience, engaging, vivid and – above all – inspirational. In Dingwell, an English village, things are never normal. Not only because they take place in the vivid dream of the narrator, but because, well, that’s just how Dingwell is. Where else would you find a gun-toting spinster, a deranged French count, murder most foul, a four-hundred-year-old barman, a nervous vicar with a secret past, a talking sparrow-hawk, and three children named Hendrix, Page, and Clapton? For the former Peter Young— now known as Pi thanks to a tirade by his math teacher, Mr. Root—Dingwell becomes a place of danger and intrigue when his brilliant parents stumble upon a life-changing invention. Running to find safety, he escapes to The Dream Factory, his family’s remote stone hut hideaway, where he unexpectedly—and magically—finds love. But as the hunt for Pi intensifies, he decides to return home only to learn that all hope is not lost. A transformative journey that offers a deeply moving portrayal of what it feels like to be an outsider looking in, John Simes’s debut serves up a spicy dish of comic romance and gothic horror. Weaving the lives of its myriad of characters seamlessly and with great tenderness, The Dream Factory: Ghosts explores our inner and outer worlds and what forms our identities as human beings.