This writer is looking for an agent.

I am a writer; I have written fiction in various forms since my earliest years. I have, however, neither attempted to write full-time nor to seek publication until now. I believe that I have developed a distinctive voice and a firm grasp of narrative and dialogue; I read my work aloud and am satisfied that it sounds "well written".

I am married and have a son who is 18 years old.

Music, particularly classical music of the 20th century, is after my family the most important thing in my life. My writing, completed and projected, focuses on the role of music in my character's lives, whether my subject is a dramatised episode in the life of a real musician or the background to a wider historical setting (e.g. the development of folk song set against the wars of central Europe).

I lived in the Czech Republic between 1993 and 1999, inspired both by the presidency of Vacláv Havel and my love for the music of Janácek. During that time I developed a greater appreciation of music by Czechoslovakian composers, many of whom did not survive the Nazi occupation, as well as a knowledge of the history, politics and society of Czechoslovakia.

By focussing on music and on the people and history of Czechoslovakia, my aim is to use specific themes to illuminate universal and topical issues.

Furiant is a 100,000 word novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1920s. A furiant is a vigorous Czech folk dance form.

Joe Williams travels to Czechoslovakia to study with the composer Leoš Janácek. The novel covers the final two years of Janácek's life during which he wrote daily letters to his muse - a married woman half his age who had, for many years, reluctantly accepted his passionate attentions. Joe experiences the unprecedented late-flowering of his teacher's genius, smug celebration of this fantasy-romance, and unsavoury bragging to his wife of fifty years.

Biographically accurate and imaginatively interpreted, Furiant explores Joe's realisation that Janácek's behaviour seems at odds with the music he creates. He is pressed to decide whether to condone, even to emulate this behaviour to further his own career. Flash-forward episodes from the period of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia also reveal dilemmas faced by Joe when confronted with demands to work for the occupiers; there are also hints at the reasons why he wearily embraces his own murder after the 1948 communist coup - the passage with which Furiant opens.