LONDON & YORKSHIRE, UK. May 14th, 2025 – A lost novel about time-travel and nuclear armageddon that was tucked away in a drawer for a quarter of a century is to be published as Big Daddy in 2025 by Hit the North.
Sci-fi thriller author Mark Brumby wrote Big Daddy (originally titled Lost Weekend) in the late nineties but, despite interest from agents and publishers, focused on a more lucrative and less risky career as a financial analyst and investor specialising in the UK’s hospitality sector.
Mark, who runs Langton Capital, an influential financial advisory company providing insightful views on the UK and global leisure industries, resurrected his writing career with the publication of Always Adam earlier this decade.
When asked by his publisher if he had anything else in the pipeline, he suggested Lost Weekend, which, with a name change, is even more relevant now than when it was originally written at the turn of the century.
‘The world is a lot more unpredictable and unbalanced than it was in 2000 with the rise of global populism, Trump’s chaotic second term and Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,’ said Hit the North publisher, Andrew Field. ‘Big Daddy’s timeless flight shows how nations should be working together as allies, not enemies.’
‘We’re chuffed to rescue Big Daddy and release the book for fans of time-travel sci-fi thrillers,’ said Andrew. ‘The title of the book is a fictious third bomb, similar to the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the second world war.’
Mark’s novel is a tense sci-fi thriller where marauding Vikings wake in the tenth century and die in the twentieth in Hull, a murderous Nazi platoon starts massacring civilians in Poland fifty years after the end of the second world war and a lost B-29 bomber resumes its deadly 1945 mission over Japan in 1999.
Although Always Adam, Big Daddy, and its unpublished sequel, were written a couple of decades ago, they don’t feel dated, according to Mark.
‘The ‘science-not-quite-fact’ should have the word ‘yet’ at the end and, as none of the science I’ve alluded to has come to pass, the stories haven’t been overtaken by events. There’s time for that to happen yet, however!’
A Cambridge graduate, chartered accountant and entrepreneur, Mark was brought up in Hull and lives in York and London. His writing style is likely to appeal to readers of Blake Crouch, Andy Weir and Iain M. Banks.
‘Like any analyst who also writes, I love to play with ‘what if’ scenarios and let my imagination run wild in a credible world. If time-travel existed, how could we ensure it was used responsibly and avoid it being exploited by the wrong people? The same question applies to artificial intelligence, especially as authors are being exploited by tech giants, and their books harvested without payment to apparently train AI software,’ said Mark.
‘As an investor, I’ve benefited from one or two windfalls, but I’ve got a habit of recycling windfalls, though, so it was, and still is, ‘two steps forward and one step back’. If I could erase all the bad stuff, I’d be laughing. For instance, one company I worked for struggled and, as a major shareholder, I made one of those ‘one step back’ moves. It wasn’t life threatening, but nobody likes to lose half their money, even if they’re still comfortable on most measures. As a family we’ve have never had a very high maintenance lifestyle so I was able to find it exciting and horrible rather than just super-horrible.
‘Books are equally risky in the sense that the vast majority of authors write brilliant novels but struggle to reach out to an audience without major investment. That’s why celebrity authors have such as advantage. They are already known and have large, loyal followings – so most of their battles are won. I think the secret for the vast majority of us is to be pragmatic and let the books loose on the world and see what happens. If you’re writing purely for money, you might be disappointed.’
Big Daddy will be published in digital format on May 23rd and in hardback (ISBN: 9781068574733) and pocket paperback (ISBN: 9781068574764) by Hit the North on June 6th.
ENDS