Jon Elkon's strength is in creating eccentric yet entirely believable characters as well as bizarre plots which could just happen. The book is based on the Author's experience of cancer within his family: he accompanied an Aunt all the way from diagnosis to holding her hand when she was dying in terrible pain. This experience was what made him determined, in some way, to get Revenge on cancer. And the best way to show one's contempt for a powerful foe is to ridicule it as he did with Apartheid in his first two novels. It is for you, the reader, to judge.
A richly comic novel, SALLY'S ROAD is a Romance in spite of itself. It is an absorbing, delightful read which grows slowly on the reader, but yields rich rewards. It will please lovers of Tom Sharpe, Kurt Vonnegut and Monty Python as well as lovers of The Archers! The book could be put under many headings: Romance, Women's Fiction, Comic Novels, and it is all of these in some way.
Sally's Road is a comi-tragic excursion into life in a modern housing estate in the Midlands, right in the heart of Old England. Sally is a young teacher, recently married to the dullard Graham, aching for excitement and a new life – aspirations which are rather clouded by the fact that she has Hodgkin’s disease. Sally is surrounded by what at first seem to be a crushingly boring selection of aspiring middle-class posers, eccentric grand dames, fake majors (‘he was a sergeant major actually’, according to the nasally impaired postmaster) and has no-one to share her observations with, other than her faithful diary. As the book unfolds she begins to realise that the locals are each in the midst of complex and fantastic lives, which encroach on her solitary world in what seems like a plot to take it over...and as she becomes more involved in their absurd plots to score points over each-other she begins to discover that there are armed camps in this Estate, manned (and womanned) by some of the craziest people she has ever met.
Gradually as the cancer gains in strength so does Sally, especially after young Annie – tousled, tomboyish and tangled up in her own story of kidnap, murder and brothers called Peverill - tumbles over the fence and changes both their lives.....and the pair become involved in kidnap, murder, rape and theft. All in the best possible taste of course!
The adventures of these two mismatched co-conspirators take them into an international plot to steal a revolutionary drug from a research facility in Omaha Nebraska, crazy sexual adventures (not with each-other!) in a furious battle against that biggest foe of all – cancer.