My stepfather, Jim Powell, who has died aged 74 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, enjoyed a career in advertising and also ran his own pottery business for 20 years before achieving success as a novelist and historian later in life.
On the publication of his first novel, The Breaking of Eggs, in 2010, when he was 61, he was selected as one of 12 Best New Novelists by BBC Two’s Culture Show. He went on to write two more novels, Trading Futures (2016) and Things We Nearly Knew (2018). At the time of his death, he had just completed a fourth, While the Music Lasts, charting the past half century through interlocking lives of a group of acquaintances against the backdrop of the socio-political changes of the period.
