The Last Ghost follows a man raised by his grandparents after his parents’ tragic death, who has a passion for technology and an understanding of business, leading him to live a successful but solitary life. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

That’s an interesting question. When I was a boy, my brother and I were sometimes left for extended periods with my paternal grandparents. The life they led was not all like the lives of our parents – they had different values and very different ways of viewing the world.

I loved being part of their world for even a short while – it was like stepping back in time and living a slower life. In its pace there was time for savouring small things and wondering at big things.

After my grandparents died that world was closed to me, but I never forgot its lessons. But what if I had? Worse, what if I had never been lucky enough to learn them in the first place? The realities of contemporary life – virtual connections in particular – can erode a sense of community, of belonging, of the responsibility to be considerate.

The idea of a full life as a true measure of a successful life appealed to me. I guess that was the inspiration for The Last Ghost.

Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the character of Joshua Stewart in the novel?

What I wanted was to give the reader a picture of how Joshua developed and changed over nearly three decades of living. What I tried to do was to suggest the reasons for his actions – his ways of thinking, of applying both reason and desire to his actions.

My work is just the start, though. The reader’s imagination puts the real flesh on the bones. For sure, you need to give readers enough to go on, but its important to leave them room to think, to imagine, and to draw conclusions. If you fill in all the blanks, you preclude that from happening. Readers are like the audience of a play – indispensable to the story-telling.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

First and foremost, our disconnected world. What happens to a person when the value and importance of the next person is lost through lack of human contact?

How does that disconnectedness wear away our ethics? How easy does it become to commit a small evil when you can’t begin to understand the human consequences?

How does one small evil lead to larger ones? And what is the cost to a person’s being?

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

I am working on the fourth book in The Scandalous Memoirs of General John Torrance series of historical fiction adventures. The working title is Jack and Will and I’m hoping that it will be published in late December.

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