Reviewed on Amazon as ‘The most entertaining book I have read in a long time’, Café Puccini is a rich, diverse and colourful novel of life in a small Australian country town during the late 1950s, but it is vastly different from most other books of this genre because it utilises many true and almost unbelievable stories which the author has researched during his years as a writer, radio broadcaster and historian. The book has been described in the press as, ‘… a hugely funny, feel-good story of exceptional strength and power.’ 

When Cactus Bob, who had once miraculously survived a crocodile death-roll, begins receiving colour-coded messages on his factory-reject, 1950s, black-and-white television, he has to decide if they have somehow been placed there by the wily old Chinese trader who had sold him the useless TV, or if they really are super-urgent warnings from outer-space.  What happens next is a fabulously funny story you will remember forever.

‘I wanted to make this a non-violent, humorous and feel-good story, so it was important for me to be able to create characters to whom readers could relate,’ Tony explains. ‘There are characters from a wide range of backgrounds including an irascible café proprietor who has managed somehow to mislay his wife for thirteen years; a former circus strongman who is ninety-nine years of age and who actually eats dynamite; a wealthy businessman whose great-grandfather, a Zulu warrior, had fought the British Redcoats at Rorke’s Drift, and a Scottish boat-builder named Jimmy who is constructing a monument to the stars. There’s even a larger-than-life Mombasa belly-dancer who is also a white witch.’                                                                                                      Café Puccini is a captivating journey into the heart of country Australia and creates a kind of time-capsule of a period when life was fun, simple and full of charm. The only thing to expect from this pulsating novel is the unexpected.                                                                                                      As Hollywood legend Hayley Mills has generously indicated, there is basically no end to the colourful characters in this book. They are wild, funny, irritating, committed, warm-hearted, bemused, devoted, bizarre and just plain stubborn, but drawing them all together in one town, during this particular period, breathes life into a time and place many of us would probably like to visit. ‘If time-travel were possible,’ Tony speculates, ‘Café Puccini is almost certainly where everyone would go for lunch and a laugh.’                                                                                       And as one five-star reviewer has added: ‘I didn’t really want it to end as I became so attached to the town and all its residents.’