John Bentley is a first-time novelist but no stranger to the headlines. After winning Harrow school’s coveted Coward History Prize – he travelled on an emigrant grant by boat to Australia returning aged 20 by road, in a series of adventures on the overland hippie trail to England, to begin a business career.  By thirty he was a self-made multi-millionaire, heading up a global media empire, which included the UK’s largest movie company and film studios producing the cult movie The Wicker Man among others.  At thirty-two, described by the international press as a corporate buccaneer, forgoing a promising political career, he sold up to retire and study philosophy, transcendentalism and metaphysics, living between New York, Paris, St Tropez and Ibiza, and the remote highlands of Scotland.

Returning to commerce in 1980, the video rental business he then started became the largest in Europe. By the mid 80’s, branded by the Press with a playboy reputation, he disappeared from the headlines to sail half way round the world. From 1990 he immersed himself in the new digital world, creating and producing the world’s first Internet TV, launched in the US in 1996, which business he sold to America’s largest software corporation. After retirement to Portugal’s Algarve coast he has with his first novel fulfilled an ambition to be a writer.