The Power of the Mind

The Power of the Mind. Non-fiction, published November 2012.

Available from Amazon here.

The definitive account of hypnotherapist the late Joe Keeton’s work in accessing past lives and inducing physical and emotional healing through hypnosis. I worked as Joe’s ghostwriter for this project and am grateful to him for the opportunity.

The Power of the Mind Joe Keeton Simon Petherick

‘This book could change your life.’ Anne Robinson

‘Joe Keeton’s most fascinating cases are included in this book.’ Daily Star

What do we really know about the power contained in our minds? Is it possible that we are losing out, every day, on the powers which could be available to us to heal physical ailments and pyschological distress?

Why is the compelling evidence for past-life regression not more widely known? 

Read in this book how world-famous hypnotherapist Joe Keeton worked with thousands of volunteers to find the answers to these questions.

‘A revolutionary technique for healing.’ John Shaw, Psychic News

‘He is a forceful and experienced hypnotherapist who can manage to achieve considerable depth of hypnotic sleep without great difficulty.’ Hans Eysenck, Director of Psychology, London Institute of Psychiatry

The Power of the Mind is hypnotherapist Joe Keeton’s account of his work in hypnosis, hypnotherapy and past life regression.

Joe, who died in 2003, was known all over the world for his skills as a hypnotist, and throughout his life he conducted thousands of sessions with people who came to him for help with physical and emotional traumas. In this book, he sets out many of his best-known cases, and presents a series of potential explanations for the parapsychology experiences which he relates. 

What secrets does the unconscious mind hold?

Joe’s hypnotherapy worked on many levels. For some patients, coming to him helped to release an unconscious psychological block which had caused problems throughout adult life. 

For others, the unconscious mind held an open door to allow the patient to enter a world it could not possibly imagine: a world where people long dead still lived.

Is it possible to access the lives of those who have lived before us?

What lies at the root of the extraordinary memories which so many members of the public revealed when under hypnosis with Joe? How is it possible for someone with no knowledge of a particular period of history to be able to impart the detailed memories of a person now long dead? Can it be true that the lives of those who have gone before us do not just end with death, but can live on in the memories of other people? Is reincarnation a reality?

‘Joe Keeton uses his vastly developed powers to treat, help and investigate an extraordinary variety of people. His work now demands formal study.’ World Medicine

Can hypnosis really be used to control the some of the body’s physical ailments?

In this book, Joe talks about how he helped thousands of people to face up to and then take control of physical symptoms which were holding them back in life. The truth is in the telling of their stories.

Read how one patient, Andrew Selby, used Joe’s hypnotic techiques to control the pain of a broken limb.

Read also how Joe met patients who were sent to him by the medical profession when all other avenues had failed.

If you are curious to know more about the workings of the mind and the memory it holds, and how we may all use the power of hypnosis to reach into ourselves to discover the strength to overcome many physical and emotional problems, then this book is for you.

Originally published in 1988, this new Kindle edition has been published in 2012 with a new Afterword by Joe’s widow, Monica. The focus on Joe’s work continues at www.joekeeton.com.

The Last Good Man

The Last Good Man. Fiction, published November 2012.

Available from Amazon here.

The Last Good Man Simon Petherick

A novel of mystery, passion, loss and longing set on a wild Cornish beach.

‘The novel speaks eloquently for itself…love, certainty, longing, regret, survival. The story features all that and more.’ Daily Mail



’A searing story of love, loneliness and tragedy…powerful plotline and stark imagery…descriptions are deeply evocative of the beautiful yet often savage coastal landscapes.’ 
Cornwall Today

A man has lived on his own beside the sea for many years. From a choice made long ago, he keeps himself separate from the world of people, and is completely at one with his environment.
His solitude is broken by the discovery, one early morning on the flat sands of a low tide, of a child washed up on the beach. Somehow, she is still alive.


‘Clearly has an intimate knowledge and love of the Cornish coastline and its unique type of village community, which feature so vividly in this charming and surreal tale of human misfits…a keen eye for descriptive detail and a talent for emotional understatement, building to a heartwrenching climax.’ 
Western Morning News

In the village, a woman reflects on a lifelong fascination with an ancient love story as she faces an unknown future.

 She has come back home to face up to the realities of her life – but at the same time, the story of Abelard and Heloise sustains her imagination.

The new arrival on the beach sets in chain a sequence of events that no-one can alter, and in this mystical work of literary fiction, we witness a man experiencing our world as though for the first time.



Discover Sam: the last good man on earth.





’Paints powerful images of the Cornish coastline and the village community.’ 
Eastern Daily Press

‘A canny mix of myth, fable and reality and I have cast my mind back to it frequently since I finished it and been able to see hidden depths.’ 
Dovegreyreader

The Damnation of Peter Pan

The Damnation of Peter Pan is published 5th April 2019 by The Word Machine: www.thewordmachine.org.

A dark and unsettling story of one family’s blighted relationship with JM Barrie’s most famous creation.

Peter Mannering, the 75-year-old son of Maimie, one of the characters featured in Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird, reflects on a life of wealth, misfortune and violence. Demons summoned from the past combine to present an horrific foretaste of the future, yet down in the basement of his Kensington mansion, a new generation of the family surely offers the possibility of redemption?

Ranging from the sweet green hills of Laugharne, the Welsh town made famous by Dylan Thomas, to the frenetic life of Soho and the new pop culture of the 1960s, The Damnation Of Peter Pan tells the story of the twentieth century through a prism of love, literature and the lexicon of the occult.

From the opening page:

‘In 1990, when my mother was four years’ old, she was foully cursed by Peter Pan in The Kensington Gardens. You will need to know more of that, of course, and you will. But that curse, laid as a single, terrible seed amongst the raised borders of The Gardens, is at last about to flower. Almost one hundred and twenty years later, as I sit here now, a febrile monster of seventy-five, quivering with age and sin in this echoing mansion in Ennismore Gardens. I tell you, that curse is finally rent open upon the world. It is a savagery, and I can barely bring myself to tell you. But I must.’

The novel is available from Amazon here.

Download an Advance Information Sheet here.

English Arcadia

English Arcadia. Fiction, published 30 November 2018.

Available from Amazon here.

english arcadia simon petherick

In June 2017, after a self-imposed absence of twenty-five years, Darius Frome returns to the family home, an imposing Lutyens mansion towering above the Thames in Buckinghamshire. The grandson of maverick political aristocrat Sir Zachary Frome and his successful novelist wife Felicity Drummond, Darius is unsettled to discover the house of his childhood riven with discord. Spanning a century of idealistic left-wing aspiration, English Arcadia delves into the depths of family rivalry, political ambition and personal tragedy, set against ancient themes of the natural world.

‘A spellbinding story that skilfully charts the disintegration of three generations of an English family following a horrific event at the bottom of an idyllic English garden. I was gripped from the first page.’

Michael Ridpath, author of The Wanderer

From the the novel’s Afterword:

‘In 1988, I travelled to Devon to interview Sir Richard Acland in his house which stood on the lands of the Killerton Estate which he himself had given to the National Trust in 1944. He was 82 at the time and graciously agreed to be interviewed by me on the subject of his latest book, Hungry Sheep, an attack on the individualistic political philosophy he identified in all contemporary parties. He was a truly remarkable man: in the 1940s, he led Common Wealth, the ultra-left wing political party which won byelections against both Conservative and Labour oppositions only to founder with the Labour landslide of 1945; in the 1950s, with Harold Wilson, he formed War On Want and subsequently championed Harrison Brown’s seminal green document, A Challenge for the Future. In later years, in his own words, he believed that “good causes will founder and evil causes will prevail unless moral and religious forces are brought in on the side of the good.”

‘I have thought about this decent, determined, kind and intelligent man for thirty years since that meeting, which is perhaps why he has served as the inspiration for the fictional character Sir Zachary Frome in this novel. The novel and the characters portrayed in it are entirely fictitious and the extended Frome family bear no relation to any people alive or dead, but I would simply like to express my thanks to Sir Richard Acland for indulging a curious young man all that time ago with such sincerity and humour.’

Download an Information Sheet from the publishers about the book here.

Buy the book from Amazon here.

A little more information on this blogpost here.