The Novels of Jerome Arthur

To all my friends. Announcing the availability in paper back of the third novel in the Farot trilogy, Life Could be a Dream, Sweetheart. As this is the second printing of this book, many of you already have a copy of it; however, you may want to purchase another copy as a gift for a friend. In addition, Antoine Farot and Swede, Down the Foggy Ruins of Time, and The Journeyman and the Apprentice are available in pdf format on this website (jeromesnovels.com).

If you would like to purchase a second copy, Life Could be a Dream, Sweetheart is now available at a cost of $7.00 per copy, plus $5.00 for shipping in the U. S. A., $10.00 in Canada and México, and $13.00 all other continents. To get your signed copy, please send your check, how you want it inscribed, and return address to:

When Antoine Farot takes a Louisville Slugger to Wiktor Sadlo, his abusive stepfather, he has no idea what adventures await him when he and his best buddy, Swede, hop a boxcar in Minneapolis, Minnesota and head south. It's Thanksgiving Day, and their plan is to escape the cold of the approaching northern winter. They meet one James Morrison, a man in his thirties with a past, and he takes them under his wing. The fifteen-year-old Antoine loses his virginity to a seventeen-year-old farm girl in southern Illinois. The three travelers get a taste of the blues on Beale Street and Dixieland jazz on Bourbon Street. They see a bank robbery in Del Rio, Texas and the filming of an "Our Gang" movie on the set in Hollywood.

This is the story of Antoine Farot's son Jerôme who is confused about his cultural identity throughout his young life. When he's two years old, he meets George Nieto, and from that point on, he thinks he's a Mexican. Jerôme tells his own story: how he survived the Dominican nuns in grammar school, served on the altar, and played sandlot baseball. At age fifteen he goes to an inner-city Catholic high school whose enrollment is about eighty percent American-Mexican. Jerôme is riding high by the end of the story. Five of his best friends are Chicanos. He meets Lana Guerrero at a sock hop and now he thinks he's finally arrived.

This is the third book in the Farot series. The time frame is the first golden age of rock 'n' roll. The story picks up one month after the last scene of Down the Foggy Ruins of Time. In this one Jerôme cruises the streets of Los Angeles with his five best friends, whom he calls "Farot's Five." Rock 'n' roll is a big part of their lives. At the beginning of the story, he meets and courts Rosie Rios, and by the end he is madly in love with Maggie Martínez. The last scene of the novel takes place on "the day the music died."

The Journeyman and the Apprentice is the story of Carlos Rangel and young Jack Niel. Carlos owns and operates the two chair barber shop that Jack eventually goes to work in. Jack is smitten by Carlos' nineteen-year-old daughter, Carmela, and as the relationship blossoms, the young lovers are discouraged at every turn by Carlos' wife, Teresa.

The Muttering Retreats tells the tale of a fourteen-year academic odyssey. Holdorff, the lead character in the story, spends that many years in two colleges and three graduate schools. He is a poet, a barroom philosopher and a well-traveled journeyman school teacher.

Barber Shop Quartet takes place on one day in the life of Jerôme Farot when he's thirty-three years old. He owns his own barber shop in El Granada, California, and he once again takes the reader through a day of cutting hair.

Tales of the Iron Chair depicts one day in a two chair barber shop. Jerôme Farot and his boss, Bernie Honig, take the reader through a busy Good Friday of cutting hair and sharing their own stories and those of the clientele.

The Death of Soc Smith is about Socrates Smith, a man in his fifties, who wakes up one morning to find his name on the obituary page of the local newspaper. The story gets more complicated when his wife receives a death certificate from the county in the mail. The next five days turn into a Kafka nightmare for Soc Smith.

Oh, Hard Tuesday is the story of a group of friends who are caught up in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. All but one of the roads leading into town are closed because of the quake. The only way supplies and emergency personnel can get into town is by helicopter, and they land on the high school football field. One of the friends is a slightly shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who lives near the high school, and when the choppers land and take off, he is transported back to his combat days.

Got no Secrets to Conceal is a love story.