Jaguar in the Drive

This unique, entertaining collection of short stories from P. Somers explores a variety of women and their adventures into the unknown. In each tale, dramatic changes in circumstances lead each character to change their environment and drastically adapt to their new surroundings.

In Jaguar in the Drive and Other Stories, Somers draws on his experience of living in a family full of women when he was growing up to create belieavable and engaging female characters. “Most men are afraid of women,” he explains. “I’m not (my wife of fifty years is still a mystery to me!), but because I started my life in a world dominated by women, I am able to create a female central character.” Somers considers his collection to be an odyssey, with each story taking place in unfamiliar territory, a world away from what is known to the protagonists.

The first story draws on the author’s own experience of meeting a jaguar in the wild in 1961, just after a hurricane in Belize. Another explores a female protagonist’s reaction to waking in a ghost town, where she finds solace in the companionship of a dog. One character is uprooted when her family moves from Russia to America, causing her to change the way she lives when her father becomes involved in an upheaval caused by the end of the Cold War…

P. Somers was born in Stockport, Cheshire, to an English mother and Irish father. He was brought up in a house full of mainly women until the sudden death of his mother, when his father moved him and his family to Ireland. At the age of 18, he decided against university education (reading Economics later in life), instead applying for work in Civil Engineering but was turned down as he hadn’t completed his National Service. After accepting a short-term engagement as a regular soldier, for various reasons he stayed for 15 years, travelling to many countries on many interesting assignments. After a blocked artery almost finished him off at the age of 59, he decided to retire early and lives in Mexico with his wife while they wait for their 60-foot Ketch to be repaired.