Third book final piece of the puzzle

Jon Doust has released Return Ticket, the final book in his Jack Muir trilogy, the semi-autobiographical series he started with Boy on a Wire in 2009.

Covering the adult life of Jack Muir, it finds the protagonist in his older years, looking back at the life he has lived, including his time in apartheid South Africa and in a kibbutz in Israel.

“I’m relieved that it’s out and there is almost a sense of relief for many people that this one has brought Jack Muir to fruition, this has bought Jack Muir to adulthood,” Doust said.

“This has had Jack reconcile with his family, with his friends and has bought him to a kind of wholeness.”

Doust relies on his own archival material and his life memories to develop story material for his Jack Muir series.

“The way I’ve written all these three books is I sit down in front of a pad or a computer screen and I write down the period as I remember it.

“The history of my life from 1972 up until now, I’ve kept journals that entire period, scrapbooks, my mother kept all the letters I wrote to her, I kept all the letters they wrote to me and so I had a wealth of material to go over.

“As I rework it I find the threads, the threads of truth, the plot lines.”

As not to stray into the territory of pure biography, Jack Muir contains many stories, including those from the lives of others and some inventions of Doust’s imagination.

“I’ve not just borrowed my story, I’ve borrowed a multitude of stories because there is a lot of other people’s stories in this book.

“Once, if I’ve realised the deep truths, the threads, the plots, then sometimes I have to embellish something, sometimes I have to actually create something that never existed in my life.”

Return Ticket is available now from Fremantle Press.