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24 | www.westendermagazine.com<br />
Writer’s Reveal<br />
meets Gordon Kerr<br />
What would you do on discovering<br />
that your recently deceased partner<br />
who you loved dearly had, in fact,<br />
been having an affair? This is the distressing<br />
situation in which journalist Michael Keats<br />
finds himself in Glasgow-born writer, Gordon<br />
Kerr’s debut fiction thriller, The Partisan<br />
Heart, before deciding to channel his grief<br />
into discovering the truth.<br />
This quest will take him away from the<br />
fast-paced London Evening Post newsroom<br />
in bustling High Street Kensington to<br />
Northern Italy, in order to track down the<br />
owner of an expensive jacket left in a hotel<br />
room his late wife, Rosa, had booked with her<br />
credit card. Michael’s editor, keen to keep his<br />
talented writer at the newspaper, hands him<br />
an italian kidnapping assignment that has the<br />
WORDS LENNY SMITH<br />
world media gripped and asks him to ‘dig (it)<br />
up’. That digging goes deeper than Michael<br />
imagined, as we learn of secret acts of love,<br />
betrayal and violence amongst the Partisans<br />
during the Second World War whose<br />
consequences permeate the present, 1999.<br />
Kerr’s extensive historical insight from<br />
penning numerous non-fiction titles enables<br />
him to depict a clear picture of what the<br />
partisan movement would have been like<br />
in 1944. Combined with a natural flair for<br />
storytelling, Kerr balances the tricky task of<br />
juggling grief and betrayal with adventure,<br />
stoicism and even occasional wit, where the<br />
search for truth – and where the search for<br />
truth needs to find a suitable conclusion –<br />
is at the heart of this story. I caught up with<br />
Gordon to ask him more.