Kris Ashton

Mowing the lawn is a ‘Zen chore’ for me; while my Victa and I are rolling back and forth across the front yard I tend to daydream and philosophise. One warm spring Saturday while giving the grass a haircut I got to wondering if I could devote an entire novel to a single Christmas Day set in the place I know best, Sydney’s suburbs. If memory serves I had recently finished David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and come away both astonished and inspired that Dickens could chronicle every minutia of someone’s life across several hundred pages and yet sustain reader interest throughout.

The book that emerged from my reverie, Christmas in the Doghouse, was the result, and it goes on sale this December. Within its pages you’ll find a fictionalised account of one hot-as-hades Christmas in Australia from the perspective of the twenty-something hero, Danny Lawson, as and his wife Angela try to navigate a fraught period in their marriage while hosting a family lunch. It’s funny, honest, dramatic and not very PC – in other words, it’s Australia as I remember it in the late 1990s, which is the book’s setting.

My fiction doesn’t often include autobiographical elements, unless they’re vague or oblique, but Christmas in the Doghouse is something of an exception. While the plot is entirely fictitious, the characters and attitudes are composites of many people I’ve known or met in the course of my adult life. I’ve therefore dedicated the book to the late author John O’Grady, one of the first post-war writers to try to capture everyday Australians as he saw them.

Christmas in the Doghouse is also the first thing I’ve self-published, mainly because it’s an almost impossible sell in the modern publishing world. It doesn’t fit into a neat genre pigeonhole, it isn’t ‘literary’ in the accepted sense of that word in 2020, and it isn’t overtly political or didactic. It’s just an old-fashioned Christmas story with an Australian twist.

It’s available to pre-order here for just three bucks. I hope you enjoy it.