Ticket To The Void - J.P. Brookes 2026 novel

Portsmouth, 1970. Danny Brockman is nineteen, in love, and about to see his first festival. Then the music stops, and he doesn't come home.

Fifty-five years later, a man walks out of a government facility looking exactly as he did the night he vanished. Not older. Not changed. Just gone for the world for longer than most people's whole lives - and now trying to find his way back into it.

This imaginative debut from Dorset writer John P. Brookes draws on the last great event - Isle of Wight Festival 1970 - as its backdrop. How fitting that this new novel should be published right now, as the remarkable events of Afton enter their 56th anniversary!