© David Arnault - 2018

E-tales

E-tales are stories by

David Arnault and are

available as downloads

from Amazon Kindle

Prayers to an Indifferent God

There is something about Davey. People are beginning to notice him. They are alarmed by him … or drawn to him. Davey and his younger brother Simon have been taken in by a small band of people who promise to search for the boys’ kidnapped parents; it is known that a corporation is holding them in the city. But the corporation doesn’t want the parents – it wants the children. This small band of four adults and three youngsters must navigate through a dangerous landscape which exists outside the law, a place inhabited by wild tribes and feral packs. The landscape is eerily familiar and the time is somewhere in the future. There is no government. There is no educational system. There are TNCs, transnational corporations which control the lives of those who work for them from birth to the grave. And there are outlaws, some violent, some defiant and some cooperative.

The Portrait of Benedetta

Bianco

Critics have described this tale as ‘weaving together art, intrigue and humour to deliver an international good read that touches the heart and satisfies the brain’. The story begins in Barcelona : a protest march against the austerity hooligans in Madrid goes horribly wrong when the army gets heavy-handed. During the confrontation, the Museu Picasso is damaged and shut down for more than a year. Three hundred of the paintings are boxed up and sent to Melbourne for the largest exhibition of the master’s work ever seen south of the Equator. However, a different kind of hooligan is poised to strike. All that stands between them and the safety of the paintings is a 64 year old woman who is annoyed with the world. 

The Three Whores of Bertolt

Brecht

Three women, three struggles, three adversaries. Three entwined stories spanning the centuries, linked by the predations of corrupt ambition, by history’s profound depths, by the love of life itself, and by courage. The 3 Whores is a masterful prosecution of war, politics and religion, but it is a love story above all else, for without the love there would be no need to tell the tale. Three women, two young and one approaching the final years of her life, show humour, courage and defiance in the face of power and intimidation. And they support one another, even across time.

Whispers: The Search for Dag

Hammarskjöld

The critics have called this tale ‘a gem’. One said, ‘I loved this amazing little book for the storytelling, but also for the tribute to Dag Hammarskjold.’ Charlotte Bildt’s daughter suddenly returns home to Sweden, her visa to teach at a nursing college in Zambia mysteriously cancelled. Later that same year, on Christmas Day, a truck rams into the family car, killing Charlotte’s husband and daughter, and leaving Charlotte with permanent injuries. Years later, in the hope that she might find some understanding, even some closure, she travels to Zambia to visit the people and places her daughter loved so much. On a slow train in Zambia, Charlotte meets Samuel Wolfe, an Australian, also looking for clues to mysteries swirling around ruthless ambition, family tragedies and suppressed dreams. Sam is motivated by the mystery of the 1961 death of Dr Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nation’s Secretary General. What they find is a sinister conspiracy, aided and abetted by mining interests and continuing to destroy lives after 130 years of ruthless greed.

A Merciless Sun

It is 2045 and 12 ships are racing through space at two-thirds the speed of light: their destination the planet Condor, a remote and forbidding rock circling around Alpha Centauri B. It is a fifteen year journey to bring back the most valuable resource known to mankind, one that would forever change the balance of power on earth. They have left behind a world that is economically depressed, suffering the ravages of climate change and pointless wars of aggression, and where privilege is hermetically sealed. Planet Earth has become a place where addiction to drugs and gambling has become a weapon of oppression and a vector for power. For many, the mission is a chance for the USA to regain its supremacy in the world, while others have more modest goals: health insurance for their families on Earth. What they didn’t sign on for was oppression, military brutality, flawed leadership and criminal conspiracies. But there is one young woman who is defiant and prepared to fight. She stands up for justice and for the man she loves, and in so doing finds some allies who begin to redefine the mission’s goals.

The Kōan of the Fisherman’s

Wife + Sato Obāsan

This novella was a medalist in the 2012 International Independent Book Awards in the category of visionary fiction. The story has been described as a ‘feast for a hungry reader’, and the author as ‘an absolute gem of a writer.  His writing is fresh, original, thoughtful and unpredictable.’ In pre-tsunami Japan, a fishing boat is blown adrift in a storm. The one surviving fisherman finds himself floating in a sea of plastic surrounded by creatures he has never before seen. When he returns to Japan, it is only to collect his wife. But he has changed and his changes unlock a genetic trigger in everyone he touches. This is the story of two women, the young wife of the fisherman who flees to a Buddhist convent in the mountains and an American Zen Buddhist Sensei who tries to protect the young wife from a world prepared to reduce her to a scientific curiosity and/or a dangerous mutant. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author has revisited the characters from the original story. The new story, Sato Obāsan, takes place five years after the original, at a time when the arms build-up and the military rhetoric from China, Japan and Korea create a tension which reverberates even in the tiny village of Aki on the south coast of Shikoku. Sato Obāsan is only available in the online edition of the original story.
“Live simply so that others may simply live.” (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)

The Unhinged Trilogy

This trilogy of novels offers three perspectives of lives caught up in the madness of an industry which has become unhinged from reality. The hydrocarbon industry is wreaking havoc on the planet’s vital organs: its soil, its oceans, its atmosphere and its forests and in so doing is robbing future generations of their future. The three tales  (Counting from One to Infinity, Until the End of Days and The Nightwatchman) follow the journeys of three individuals who stand up to this unhinged industry, to its agents and its acolytes and its mute victims.

Counting from One to Infinity

 (Volume 1)

Fifty years after the publication of ‘Silent Spring’ the world has forgotten the message that Rachel Carson taught: and Malcolm Firestone is annoyed. Malcolm is a teacher, a poet and a grandfather, a gentle man in love with the natural world. And Malcolm is dying. He sets out on a journey of defiance in the face of the powerful forces that are so arrogant they dare to change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. After destroying a fracking site near his home, Malcolm moves from Australia to the Rachel Carson Homestead outside of Pittsburgh, but he leaves behind a clue to his thinking, Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, ‘Crime and Punishment’. Inspired by the memory and the courage of Rachel Carson, Malcolm wonders if the free market isn’t using its industrial muscle to wage war on its own people, if it isn’t sacrificing people for profit, trading the future for the present, and he wonders what sort of world his grandchildren will inherit. Over and over, Rachel Carson reminded us of the consequences of trying to achieve our desires with industrial muscle. After all, that’s why the spring became silent.” Counting from One to Infinity is a love story, one that might touch even the hard-hearted.

Until the End of Days

(Volume 2)

Imagine the blackness of outer space, its vastness, the incomprehensible distances between orbiting bodies, and the irresistible push and pull of forces which would inevitably bring bodies together with wonderfully, beautifully catastrophic results. Storm Villiers looked at life that way, each man, woman and child an orbiting body, a projectile on a collision course with … well, who knew after all, perhaps a thousand others, perhaps just one, one final impact and then the orbiting body would cease to exist and history would move on, forgetting that person ever walked the surface of the earth. His life collides with that of Anestasia Burgh. Growing up on the edge of a pristine estuary in eastern South Africa, she is witness to its destruction, the end of her community and the deaths of the man she loved and of her mother. When finally, she flees with her son and father, she is pursued by the same force. In another place of beauty, on the other side of the earth, she turns to confront the wicked beast.

The Nightwatchman

(Volume 3)

Steward is an easy going young man but two people approach him independently and try to convince him to become part of their plans and schemes. But when one of those people offers him $50,000 to perjure himself, he sees it as a way to satisfy the other person’s hopes and plans.  

Death in a Featureless

Landscape

When vision fails, other senses come into play. An Inuit hunter becomes the target of a killer when he refuses to allow his people to be the guinea pigs in corporate experiments. A lone man, full of grief, crosses the planet to visit his daughter on Baffin Island. Adrift in a dense fog, the players and their plots unravel while a deadly dialogue takes place between prey and predator.

We Shall Walk Until there is

no more Land

“Seeing the white person was enough for Sahra to step back unconsciously, a little further into the safety of the black night, a veil to protect her from whatever evil might be at hand.” This is an intriguing story, introducing a fictional character of immense courage and determination into an all-too-real landscape of discrimination and detention. At a time when 60 million souls have become refugees, this is but one of their tales.

A Landscape Unveiled

During the fiercest heat wave in living memory and with the entire city focussed on a tennis tournament, a man of peace is murdered as he leaves home to be with his wife who is about to deliver their third child. Abraham Glass is a controversial figure, a prominent Jewish physician who has raised money to build a trauma wing for a hospital in Gaza City. Those who work with him consider him a saint: those who don’t know him call him a serial pest, a disgrace, a traitor.
David Arnault's the Nightwatchman David Arnault's Prayers to an indifferent God David Arnault's The Portrait of Benedetta Bianco David Arnault's The 3 Whores of Bertolt Brecht David Arnault's Whispers: The Search for Dag Hammarskjold David Arnault's A Merciless Sun David Arnault's Counting from one to infinity David Arnault's Until the end of Days David Arnault's We Shall Walk Until there is no more Land
David Arnault storeyteller & Novelist David Arnault's a landscape unveiled

E-tales

E-tales are stories by

David Arnault and

are available as

downloads from

Amazon Kindle

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Made with Xara

Prayers to an

Indifferent God

There is something about Davey. People are beginning to notice him. They are alarmed by him … or drawn to him. Davey and his younger brother Simon have been taken in by a small band of people who promise to search for the boys’ kidnapped parents; it is known that a corporation is holding them in the city. But the corporation doesn’t want the parents – it wants the children. This small band of four adults and three youngsters must navigate through a dangerous landscape which exists outside the law, a place inhabited by wild tribes and feral packs. The landscape is eerily familiar and the time is somewhere in the future. There is no government. There is no educational system. There are TNCs, transnational corporations which control the lives of those who work for them from birth to the grave. And there are outlaws, some violent, some defiant and some cooperative.

The Portrait of

Benedetta Bianco

Critics have described this tale as ‘weaving together art, intrigue and humour to deliver an international good read that touches the heart and satisfies the brain’. The story begins in Barcelona : a protest march against the austerity hooligans in Madrid goes horribly wrong when the army gets heavy- handed. During the confrontation, the Museu Picasso is damaged and shut down for more than a year. Three hundred of the paintings are boxed up and sent to Melbourne for the largest exhibition of the master’s work ever seen south of the Equator. However, a different kind of hooligan is poised to strike. All that stands between them and the safety of the paintings is a 64 year old woman who is annoyed with the world. 

The Three Whores of

Bertolt Brecht

Three women, three struggles, three adversaries. Three entwined stories spanning the centuries, linked by the predations of corrupt ambition, by history’s profound depths, by the love of life itself, and by courage. The 3 Whores is a masterful prosecution of war, politics and religion, but it is a love story above all else, for without the love there would be no need to tell the tale. Three women, two young and one approaching the final years of her life, show humour, courage and defiance in the face of power and intimidation. And they support one another, even across time.

Whispers: The Search

for Dag Hammarskjöld

The critics have called this tale ‘a gem’. One said, ‘I loved this amazing little book for the storytelling, but also for the tribute to Dag Hammarskjold.’ Charlotte Bildt’s daughter suddenly returns home to Sweden, her visa to teach at a nursing college in Zambia mysteriously cancelled. Later that same year, on Christmas Day, a truck rams into the family car, killing Charlotte’s husband and daughter, and leaving Charlotte with permanent injuries. Years later, in the hope that she might find some understanding, even some closure, she travels to Zambia to visit the people and places her daughter loved so much. On a slow train in Zambia, Charlotte meets Samuel Wolfe, an Australian, also looking for clues to mysteries swirling around ruthless ambition, family tragedies and suppressed dreams. Sam is motivated by the mystery of the 1961 death of Dr Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nation’s Secretary General. What they find is a sinister conspiracy, aided and abetted by mining interests and continuing to destroy lives after 130 years of ruthless greed.

A Merciless Sun

It is 2045 and 12 ships are racing through space at two- thirds the speed of light: their destination the planet Condor, a remote and forbidding rock circling around Alpha Centauri B. It is a fifteen year journey to bring back the most valuable resource known to mankind, one that would forever change the balance of power on earth. They have left behind a world that is economically depressed, suffering the ravages of climate change and pointless wars of aggression, and where privilege is hermetically sealed. Planet Earth has become a place where addiction to drugs and gambling has become a weapon of oppression and a vector for power. For many, the mission is a chance for the USA to regain its supremacy in the world, while others have more modest goals: health insurance for their families on Earth. What they didn’t sign on for was oppression, military brutality, flawed leadership and criminal conspiracies. But there is one young woman who is defiant and prepared to fight. She stands up for justice and for the man she loves, and in so doing finds some allies who begin to redefine the mission’s goals.

The Kōan of the

Fisherman’s Wife +

Sato Obāsan

This novella was a medalist in the 2012 International Independent Book Awards in the category of visionary fiction. The story has been described as a ‘feast for a hungry reader’, and the author as ‘an absolute gem of a writer.  His writing is fresh, original, thoughtful and unpredictable.’ In pre-tsunami Japan, a fishing boat is blown adrift in a storm. The one surviving fisherman finds himself floating in a sea of plastic surrounded by creatures he has never before seen. When he returns to Japan, it is only to collect his wife. But he has changed and his changes unlock a genetic trigger in everyone he touches. This is the story of two women, the young wife of the fisherman who flees to a Buddhist convent in the mountains and an American Zen Buddhist Sensei who tries to protect the young wife from a world prepared to reduce her to a scientific curiosity and/or a dangerous mutant. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author has revisited the characters from the original story. The new story, Sato Obāsan, takes place five years after the original, at a time when the arms build-up and the military rhetoric from China, Japan and Korea create a tension which reverberates even in the tiny village of Aki on the south coast of Shikoku. Sato Obāsan is only available in the online edition of the original story.