No Life Like It: Book One
Paperback ISBN: 9781647506032
Ebook ISBN: 9781647509262
In June, Saskatchewan-based author John Tripp released his novel, No Life Like It: Book One, which chronicles the adventures of Jack Leywood in the Canadian Navy.
Leywood joins the navy and quickly makes a name for himself as a crack student being the first in his class. His luck changes when he discovers the joys of racing sail with one of his ship’s officers.
His temper flares when he and his pal discover a young girl dead of an overdose and the germ of an idea forms: he would take on the drug lords of the Union Corse sending heroin ashore in New Brunswick. Then using his racing ketch as a base, his friends join him to begin taking down the yachts dropping off the white death. Their efforts attract the attention of Charles DeGaulle who decorates Leywood for bravery and the dragons are born.
The author's personal life is grounded in military history.
Tripp was born in England in 1944 on the night of Germany’s attack on the Ardennes Forest, where his father Captain William Neil Tripp fought as a combat engineer in the RCEME in the British Second Army. He was brought to Canada as a two-year-old boy.
Tripp's father died of PTSD in 1948. Tripp grew up as an orphan in Saskatchewan and didn’t meet his mother until 1964 when he joined the Australian forces fighting in Vietnam. He was decorated with the General Service Medal with Vietnam clasp for his part in the fighting around the Mekong Delta.
After leaving the service in 1968, Tripp lived homeless on the streets of Vancouver working to help his contemporaries, providing first aid and feeding the homeless he was on intimate terms with through a Vancouver charity called Kool Aid. He never attended university and always wished he could have afforded to go. However, he did work in the hotel and bar industry as a bartender, bodyguard and maître d until attending Caribou College in Kamloops, B.C., where he studied building construction. He went on to work 40 years in the construction industry, first starting as a cabinetmaker and finishing as a project manager.
Tripp has a wife and two children in British Columbia, but lives alone as a religious recluse, writing to express both feelings and memories and playing his guitars for entertainment between writing and editing. He has been writing for 14 years.
Orders can be placed via Ingram or directly via Austin Macauley.
