Lindy Kato (Writer)

I’m so excited because my second book Bleak Expectations is at the printers. This is a sneak preview of the cover. It’s one of my own photos and I mention swimming a few times in the book. I swim like a rock does – which is setting up for the last book Acts of defiance which will be out later this year. Then I MUST swim, with purpose, in the right direction and within a time cut off.

This is a book that I had to write after I was gaslit by someone in the mental health profession and that is wrong. It’s always wrong, but doubly wrong when a psychiatrist does it to you. I couldn’t leave it behind but yet I couldn’t write it down until Mum had passed away because she was a reader. I wouldn’t want her to read it. There isn’t any point upsetting an elderly lady over something she can do nothing about and isn’t to blame in any event.

It’s been hard though. Writing is cathartic, reading it back, editing and all that, is re-traumatising.

In case you are coming to this without knowing the background, the first book Desperate Times has garnered a minor fan club. I’m useless at blowing my own trumpet and advertising etc. which is something I need to fix.

This is a review of Desperate Times is by local author Patricia Fenton most famous for War Bride and now After The War https://heritagepress.nz/product/war-bride-bundle/  These are historical novels based on the real life of her husband’s parents. My books are also historical but classed as autoethnography, or a ‘lived experience’.

Here is Trish’s review:

Desperate Times by Lindy Kato

Reviewer – Patricia Fenton

Desperate Times unfolds like a series of disorientating moving images. I began reading it, full of doubt and confusion, until I realised that was entirely the author’s intention. Within a short time, I was swept up in the scenario, bowling along at a breakneck pace. (Almost literally! From the beginning and as the story evolved, the narrator suffered many life-threatening physical injuries, often in the line of duty.)

The setting for this ethnographic narrative moves through the 1980s British health system, particularly nursing in mental health, and in the final chapters, migrates to the New Zealand health system in 1987, concluding in 1996. It provides insights into nursing practices and institutional provisions, attitudes and beliefs on opposite sides of the world, that only an insider could recount.

The author’s wry turn of phrase and gallows humour propel the momentum and bring a lift to what could otherwise be a bleak catalogue of disasters. 

Authentic in every way, the narrative is pure human experience. No other living person, let alone a machine, could have written an ethnographic account that captures time and place so vividly.  Desperate Times informs our understanding of what has gone before and the lessons that must surely be learnt if we are to create a better future for our most vulnerable citizens and for those who put their own lives at risk to care for them.  

Amid the mountains of books written to a commercial formula Desperate Times is refreshingly raw, real and unique.

I await with great interest the opportunity to follow the continuing story as further publications from Lindy Kato come to fruition.

I will be taking both books to the Ages of Pages Book Fair in Hamilton (NZ) https://www.agesofpagesbookfair.com/ for the 2^nd May. Assuming I have any petrol… It will be the first Time Bleak Expectations is seen in the flesh but I’ll have a proper launch – most likely on the 4^th May.

Desperate Times is available directly from me in you are local, https://books2read.com/u/m2ky2d for e copies (it’s on kindle as well). Real life copies are available in the Underground Bookstore https://www.theundergroundbookstore.nz/Desperate-Times-p812769510 and as soon as I have some actual hard copies, Bleak Expectations will be there as well. They are also available as print on demand.