Andrew Crofts - Ghostwritten Fiction

The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer

By Andrew Crofts

Fifteen year-old Maggie arrives in London on the run from her humdrum suburban life, determined to make it big in show business.

For more than thirty years she is exploited by both men and the media. She struggles against endless set-backs and disappointments, always remaining optimistic, always believing that this time her big break has come. Then, when most of us would have given up all hope, the celebrity circus rockets her to bizarre and unexpected pinnacles of fame.

Starting in 1970 Maggie de Beer’s journey mirrors the rise of celebrity culture and the growth of the media which ruthlessly created it, exploiting and destroying the lives of girls like Maggie who willingly offered themselves up, happy to make any amount of personal sacrifices in exchange for a chance to live the dream. She is determined to make herself “interesting” and only when she finally achieves her goal, at enormous personal cost, does she discover, under the full glare of the media spotlight, that the family she was running away from was never as humdrum as she had believed.

“This, I thought as the chauffeured car slid me back from Park Lane to Earls Court behind darkened windows, is what life must have been like for party girls like Christine Keeler in the sixties. I had found my Xanadu, the place where I was meant to be …”

Read more about The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie De Beer on the Maggie De Beer and Steffi McBride website.

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The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride

The story of a girl who becomes a soap star and national treasure overnight, only to discover from media revelations that nothing about her family life is as she imagined.

'Beautifully written, well paced and a real page turner' sums this book up in cliches, but there is much more to say about it. Although the subject matter is very different, this book is as much a tale of our time as 'A Kind of Loving' is of the late 1950s. And in telling it in the first person, Crofts keeps you as close and as sympathetic to Steffi as Barstow does with Vic Brown. All the other characters are truly believable and the twists in the plot entirely credible. Crofts doesn't mince his language, but the swearing is carefully placed and right in character. Don't let the girly-pink cover put you off - this is a punchy story that will appeal to men and women alike.

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The fictionalised true story of a gangster who fell in love with a middle eastern princess he was hired to guard.

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The first in a series of crime thrillers centered around the life of a ghostwriter and featuring some stolen breasts and a surprising number of Filipino girls called Doris..
Read the first chapter
Buy From Amazon.co.uk

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