Graham Frankel has stepped into the world of fiction for his second lockdown book, Kate’s Progress, which charts the rise of a girl who becomes obsessed with table tennis.
Set mainly in the future, the central character of the novel is Kate, a girl born in 2016, who gets into the sport aged eight. It is not just a story about Kate, but also the club where she learns to play, and how a team of table tennis enthusiasts face the challenges of building the club in a pandemic-stricken world.
Kate’s Progress is available from Amazon in paperback or as a Kindle version, priced from £4.99. Click HERE to open the Amazon page.
Graham, who coaches at the BATTS club in Harlow, released the book following the success of Ping! which was written during the first lockdown.
That book was the result of years of researching the history of the sport and especially developments since the early 1950s, when England last had a world champion. Ping! became an Amazon best-selling racket sports book and Graham was staggered by the positive feedback. When the pandemic put a stop to his coaching for a second time, he seized the chance to get writing again.
He said: “When I wrote Ping! last year I had no intention of following it with another book. But the response from readers was so encouraging that I began thinking about what could come next.
“It had to be another table tennis book, that much was certain. During the long dark days of lockdown 2, the idea began to take shape in my mind. A fiction, set in an imagined future, about a young girl who become obsessed with table tennis.
“As I began to build the story, I became totally absorbed with Kate’s world. When spring arrived, and I could look forward to the prospect of coaching again, Kate’s story was almost complete.”
You can read more about both of Graham’s books at his website HERE.