Available August 1st, 2012

This bittersweet chronicle of how an eccentric working horse finally gains his freedom was inspired by the characteristics of a real animal.

The city locations, the ancient stable and the plotline of redevelopment were also based on truth, through personal research, interviews and newspaper archives.

Although written as a novel, the story represents the passing of an era which should not go unrecorded.

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Author’s Note

Of all the novels I’ve written, this may well be my favorite. It was certainly one of the most heartwarming to write.

I was inspired primarily by a horse called Catarie, once owned by my friend, Bill Demers of West Brome, Quebec. She was a big horse, independent, stubborn and eccentric, living a comfortably pampered life on his country property. Most of the time, she roamed freely around the field.

For the sake of the story, I transferred the location to the center of Montreal. There was, indeed, an Irish-run stable in the city just like the one I describe, in an area the developers had been eyeing for years.

I threw all these facts together with an evocative dose of reality, added a cast of believably flawed characters, and emerged with this novel.

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Leon Berger is an accomplished novelist and marketer living in Montreal, Canada. Read more about Leon here, visit his website, or find about his other new release, the memoir Lunch with Charlotte.

Horse will be available August 1st, 2012 for $3.99 in ebook format on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, for $12.99 in trade paperback and $19.99 in hardcover on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com or through direct purchase below.

Buy direct through Grey Gecko Press!

Get your books autographed and personalized, and the ebook in your preferred format is FREE!

Pre-order through our website and save 10% off your copy AND receive a free ebook copy
of any of our other titles as a bonus!

Edition

Hardcover $17.99 USD Trade Paperback $11.69 USD Kindle $3.59 USD Nook/iBooks/Kobo $3.59 USD

Free Ebook (w/ Print Order Only)

Kindle Nook / iBooks / Kobo

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Available July 1st, 2012

Every Friday for the last 25 years of her life, I had lunch with Charlotte and each week she told me more of her extarordinary story.

To all appearances, she was a strong and dignified survivor, with old-world courtesies, a twinkling sense of humor and a lilting Austrian syntax. Yet deep within, she’d been scarred by a profound personal trauma.

Finally, just before she died at the age of 91, she chose to entrust me with this dark secret and all at once I understood how it had affected her entire adult life.

This is not just the true story of a remarkable woman and our extraordinary friendship but also an epic saga set against the backdrop of history.

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Author’s Note

This memoir was something I just had to do.

I must admit that my passion for writing is generally more predisposed towards fiction but after such an unusual friendship spanning a quarter century, I felt I not only had to set it all down but that I had to do so accurately. Every word had to reflect the spirit, the experience and the extraordinary life of Charlotte herself.

Every aspect is just as she related it to me, yet it wasn’t an easy project. Charlotte told me her anecdotes haphazardly over a quarter century, a piece here, a fragment there, sometimes repeating herself, sometimes going back to correct herself. That’s why I asked one of the curators at the Montreal Holocaust Center, Julie Guinard, to check the first draft to see if it all made sense and it was her feedback that encouraged me to finish it up.

As Charlotte always said, I was like the son she never had, and I still mourn her passing.

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Leon Berger is an accomplished novelist and marketer living in Montreal, Canada. Read more about Leon here, visit his website, or find about his other new release, Horse.

Lunch with Charlotte will be available July 1st, 2012 for $4.99 in ebook format on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, for $14.99 in trade paperback and $24.99 in hardcover on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com or through direct purchase below.

Buy direct through Grey Gecko Press!

Get your books autographed and personalized, and the ebook in your preferred format is FREE!

Pre-order through our website and save 10% off your copy AND receive a free ebook copy
of any of our other titles as a bonus!

Edition

Hardcover $22.49 USD Trade Paperback $13.49 USD Kindle $4.49 USD Nook/iBooks/Kobo $4.49 USD

Free Ebook (w/ Print Order Only)

Kindle Nook / iBooks / Kobo

Choose your Bonus eBook!

I first began writing when I returned from overseas 15 years ago and I now have 6 novels published, plus my recent work of non-fiction.

In my day job, I’m a consultant specializing in the field of marketing, branding and communications, having worked and traveled extensively across 5 continents. At various times I’ve been based in London, New York, Singapore and Beijing — but these days I prefer to spend as much time as possible back in Canada.

My home is in Montreal where I got to know Charlotte, the venerable subject of my book Lunch with Charlotte. I’m also fortunate to have a country property where I spend my weekends, and it was here that I met the unique animal which inspired my novel Horse.



Upcoming Appearances

Coming Soon!

Published by Grey Gecko Press

Novels

Horse (August 1, 2012)

Memoir

Lunch With Charlotte (July 1, 2012)

Connect with Leon:

Worldreader’s mission is to make digital books available to all in the developing world, enabling millions of people to improve their lives. Digital technology is sharply reducing the cost and complexity of delivering reading material everywhere. We are developing the systems and the partnerships to get e-readers – and the life-changing, power-creating ideas contained in e-books – into the hands and minds of people in the developing world.

Every day, millions of children struggle to get even subsistence access to reading materials. Worldreader uses e-readers, existing mobile phone infrastructure and declining technology costs to put a huge range of digital books in their hands.

The results are staggering. As of recently, Worldreader has wirelessly distributed more than 75,000 African and international e-books to children in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, and the children spend up to 50% more time reading than before, with some reading up to 90 books in a single year.



Worldreader is a great program that allows books of all types and kinds to be distributed for free to children in Africa and elsewhere (South America, etc). It costs publishers and authors nothing to join the program — we simply have to authorize Amazon to push our books to the specific Kindles used by Worldreader. That’s it.

When I heard about this program, I immediately thought, “This is something we need to be involved in.” Not because it will make us look better, or sell more of our books (eventually) or give me a warm fuzzy… but rather, for the most important reason of all: to get kids reading. Some of these kids are reading 90 books in a year. NINETY.

Try finding more than a handful of kids across the US who read that much. Or even close. I dare you. And it’s not just kids, either. The program administrators, teachers, and other personnel also get free copies. How could this possibly be a bad thing for anyone involved?

So I checked with my authors, and as I suspected, none of them had any objections whatsoever to our participation. I then signed the contract, allowing Amazon to push not only our current titles (including all our short stories), but all our future titles as well, for as long as the agreement lasted, through renewal after renewal.

It’s not very often that you get to do something good on such a monumental scale. One of the things I hoped to do with Grey Gecko Press was to change the world, if only in a small way. Well, I think we’ve gone beyond that, and I couldn’t be happier!

To find out how you can help, visit the website, like them on Facebook, or follow the project on Twitter. Everyone can make a difference. You just have to take action. Now’s as good a time as any!

For the settlers on the windswept plains of the planet Lonesome, life is hard and occasionally cruel. Faced with an influx of ‘Newbies’ – new settlers, with new ideas – the Originals’ animosity is growing. And for one family, that animosity could spell the end.



THIS IS A SHORT STORY of approximately 4,400 words. Also included is a 5,000 word excerpt from the full-length novel Aristeia: Revolutionary Right. A stand-alone short story, Lonesome is just $1 and is available on Kindle and Nook.

“I like a little rebellion now and then…The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Unlike her brother, Saracasi Ocaitchi has always known that her loyalties belong to the ideals of freedom and democracy, not the government of the Alliance, and that protecting those ideals would require a fight. But now that the rebellion she has dreamed about has finally begun, she must come to terms with what that truly means: for herself, for her brother, and for all of the people who will die in the coming war.

Written in the spirit of heroic space adventure, Aristeia: A Little Rebellion is the second book in the Aristeia series by author Wayne Basta. The first book, Aristeia: Revolutionary Right, is available now.

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Aristeia: A Little Rebellion will be released on June 1^st, 2012.

Want to win a free ebook copy? How about a super prize pack including a hardcover edition of every book in Grey Gecko’s catalog? Click here to find out how!

If you’re in the Houston area, you can get your copy of Aristeia: A Little Rebellion early at Comicpalooza 2012 at the George R. Brown Convention Center, May 25 – 27, 2012!

Buy direct through Grey Gecko Press!

Get your print edition autographed and personalized, and the ebook in your preferred format is FREE!

Pre-order through our website and save 10% off your copy AND receive a free ebook copy
of any of our other titles as a bonus!

Edition

Hardcover $22.49 USD Trade Paperback $13.49 USD

Free Ebook (w/ Print Order Only)

Kindle Nook / iBooks / Kobo

Choose your Bonus eBook!

RELEASE DATE:   May 25, 2012

With a foreword by acclaimed horror author Jonathan Maberry, a dozen delectable and deliciously devilish delights await the discerning palate in this collection of short stories from the authors of Grey Gecko Press. The crunchy exteriors of these horrors thrill and excite, only to pale in comparison to the warm marrow of their gooey centers.

An assassin-in-training reflects on his past as he devours the price of his ascension to power. The nature of reality is in flux as a man tries to convince himself what he’s experiencing is merely an illusion, and something is rotten in Victorian London.

One man’s automobile is another’s bloody end, and a dear, departed father passes down the most detestable of gifts to his son. One man saves a world at the cost of another’s heart, and the English find the most reasonable way to meet their needs in the worldwide food shortage.

Science fiction. Thriller. Fantasy. Americana and Japanese folklore; all these genres and more make their appearance in the premier short story collection from Grey Gecko Press. You don’t want to miss out on this feast of fiction!

Authors include:

• Gabrielle Alan
• Wayne Basta
• Leo King
• Jason Kristopher
• Lee Lackey
• Austin Malone
• George Wright Padgett
• H. C. H. Ritz
• Amy Theacasi
• B. H. Werner

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Your book will ship on or before the release date – basically as soon as we can get all the authors together to autograph the books for you. We ship all books via USPS Priority Mail. If you’re in the Katy area, you can arrange a time to pick up your order by emailing us here: sales@greygeckopress.com.

Select your edition of the book (paperback, hardcover, or ebook) from the list below, and make sure to enter the format of your free ebook!

Edition

Hardcover$17.99 USD Trade Paperback$9.99 USD Kindle$2.99 USD Nook, Sony, Kobo$2.99 USD

Preferred Ebook Format

I’ve often said that the only thing holding back the size of Grey Gecko is the number of authors and editors that we have. Well, folks, today we ran up against that wall. We simply don’t have enough editors to get all our books out on time! So we’re looking for some more editing folks that can get as excited about our little company as we are.

Though naturally experience is preferred, we’re looking for anyone with a talent for editing. We have a unique and innovative compensation package and a great work process that provides the ultimate in flexibility. So if you’re looking for something new and exciting, and want to get in on the ground floor, now’s the time!

Check out our Editors Wanted! page for more information, or send a cover letter and resume to our editing staff: editor@greygeckopress.com. Welcome to the team!

Not so with Grey Gecko Press.

I screwed up. Yes, me, the CEO/owner/head honcho. The buck stops with me. I uploaded a patently and obviously erroneous version of my novel The Dying of the Light: End to Kindle and Nook, rushing to get it done faster rather than taking the time I needed to make sure it was done right.

For the record, CORRECT is better than FAST.

So who knows how many people downloaded a frankly piss-poor copy of the book, wondering at all the faults and typos and errors. I can’t blame them. I took another look at the book after a couple reviews mentioned it and I couldn’t believe I’d let this thing get by me in the shape it’s in. Now, I could go on and on about MS Word’s “Track Changes” feature, or how I was just trying to make things easier, or a hundred other excuses. But none of that matters, because I screwed up.

And it’s up to me to make it right. So here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Anyone who has purchased a copy of the Kindle or Nook version since January 20th can receive a brand-new Kindle or Nook copy (without all the bad formatting and typos) simply by emailing support (support AT greygeckopress DOT com) and asking for it. No verification is necessary. We will honor all requests for new copies until March 23rd – 30 days from today.
2. All requests for new copies will also receive another random Grey Gecko Press title as well, in the format requested, as a thank you for letting us fix the problem.
3. Our processes have been altered on a permanent basis to insure that this doesn’t happen again.

I apologize to any and all who downloaded such a shoddy copy of my book. It is Grey Gecko’s intent to produce high-quality materials in all our editions, and we let you, our readers, down in this case. We hope that you’ll give our titles another chance, and we look forward to bringing you great stories from the best new and emerging authors!

Sincerely,

Jason Aydelotte
Executive Director, Grey Gecko Press