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Gypsy the Gem Dealer is a fictional travelogue memoir that centers on transculturation and a boy's quest to understand life after death. It has a developing setting that started in West Midlands of England in the 1960s, down to North and West Africa and to the Middle East and back to the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The setting also encompasses other European cities, South and East Asia, and the Pacific. Throughout all these travels, the book introduces different spiritual practices inherent to the West and the East, side by side with colonial legacy. Each chapter builds on a boy's spiritual journey that started in a funeral, a Catholic graveyard, and horrible nightmares while he was in Europe.
Gypsy's quest figures in the 1970s while on a summer camping vacation in France. On his family's way to town from the campsite one day, they came across a funeral procession. Probably his first-time witnessing a cultural event such as this, the eight-year-old Gypsy conjured questions regarding life after death. Once back in England, he visited a Catholic graveyard for clues and to contemplate on death. Death scared him, but he was determined to understand the phenomenon.
This 668-page book leaves readers pondering on the same issues Gypsy has to explore. The author valiantly demonstrates the practices he considers skin-deep among the established religions, all the while holding the reader's attention through his raw approach to narration. The book may be of interest to academics and students of creative writing, religion, history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.