About the Author

Hugo Johnson was born in 1939, the son of a serving RAF officer and the daughter of an Irish landed family. After the war, the family moved to Germany during the occupation and that country’s subsequent rehabilitation to sovereign status. Like his sister, he was educated in England before moving to Spain and Germany to continue his studies. He emigrated to California in 1960. There followed the well trod path of driving trucks and selling encyclopaedias before embarking on a career in advertising as a junior copywriter.

Back in Europe five years later, he was taken on to organise trade fairs and industrial exhibitions overseas, during which he worked in some fifty countries over the ensuing twenty-five years.

A Thing of Shreds and Patches began as an attempt to write a television series in the late 1980s. Many hundreds of hours of research and two thousand pages of unpublished dialogue later, the work found a home on a neglected shelf whilst the author wrote a series of children’s books, a thriller, several satires and three fables based on the (then) little understood phenomenon of the internet. None was published.

In the early nineteen nineties, he resuscitated Shreds and Patches to rework it as a series of eight novels. Fifteen years later, the results are posted on this website.