Rules for Old Men Waiting

MacIver, military historian and one-time centre for Scotland’s rugby team has holed up in his holiday home after his wife’s death. He makes rules to keep himself going, as he and his house crumble away – what he must burn, when he should eat, how to write something everyday…As he becomes involved in his story about soldiers in the trenches of the Great War he begins to reflect on his own experiences in WWII and the loss of his son in Vietnam, and attempts to make sense of his life and he trubulent era through which he has lived.

Reviews of Rules for Old Men Waiting

"A lean, quietly elegiac postscript to the protaganist's existence… told in simple, restrained prose, this is a novel brimming with humanity – one to savour" — Hephzibah Anderson Observer "Written with admirable restraint and composed with sturdy, elegant prose, it's an object lesson in the fact that, sometimes, less can be more. Human and moving" Daily Mail "A quarter of a century in the making, Peter Pouncey's first novel is laden with the fruits of a lifetime's reflection… The detail reveals Pouncey as a brilliant miniaturist" Guardian "An intense, memorable little book" The Times "Poignant…profound and moving. The work of a superior intelligence" Irish Independent