Book Description

Wheel of Destiny is a novel of intrigue, adventure and explicit sexuality. An English teacher flees the threat of death across the world in the company of his provocative pupil. When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls' grammar school in England and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather's wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest that ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters' latent sexuality. While the novel takes the form of a thriller, it is also a love story. The plot pivots round the war-diary of a man whose bomber was shot down in action in Egypt in 1941. The man had invested money in partnership with his wartime friend in an opal mine in a place designated by the letters 'C.P.' in 'S.A.'. His granddaughter's search for the mine affects her own as well as her former teacher's destiny.


About the author


The author at the launch of Winston Churchill by his Personal Secretary, at the Churchill Museum, Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, in February 2008

Charles Humphrey Muller, MA (Wales), PhD (London), DLitt (OFS), DEd (SA), was Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of the North in South Africa for ten years, and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of South Africa before that. He is the author of numerous academic textbooks and literary studies published by Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill, and was editor of Unisa English Studies and Communiqué, literary journals of the University of South Africa and the University of the North. In 1988 he left his academic career to move to Scotland where he bought a small hotel  fifty miles south of Edinburgh - to devote more time to creative writing. He has since sold the hotel and written a number of novels (A Twist in Time, The Cage and the Cross, Wheel of Fortune, Continental Drift), and with his wife Joanne has co-authored two novels (Rapture at Sea and Spirit of Ecstasy by ‘Carolyn Charles’). He wrote the inspirational work Have Anything You Really Really Want , and served as editor for his wife’s ‘self-help’ book So You Want to Buy a Small Hotel! He also edited this collection of testimonies titled Touched by God.