Your cart is empty 
Lek - The BeginningAt twenty-one years of age, Lek, an ordinary, contemporary, farm girl from the northern Thai Rice belt, had to go to Pattaya to work in the leisure industry to help her widowed mother pay off the mortgage to save the farm from foreclosure and keep her siblings in school. This book, The Beginning, shows what her life was like before she had to leave her small, hard-working, but happy village and the only people she had ever known. It depicts the events that made her happy and those that saddened her in her early life from living with her grandmother to surviving with her husband, Tom. At the very last moment, some friends step up to make Lek's transition to life in Thailand's number one sex city just that little bit easier.
The Behind The Smile Series is the story of Lek, a bar girl in Pattaya, Thailand. Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family in the northern rice belt of Thailand. A catastrophe occurred out of the blue one day – her father died young with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was just twenty years of age, and the only one who could prevent the foreclosure of the family farm, and allow her younger sister and two brothers to continue their education. However, the only way she knew how was to go to work in her cousin's bar in Pattaya.Can a Pattaya bar girl ever go back to being a regular girlfriend or wife?Behind The Smile is a look into one part of Thailand, a country known around the world as 'The Land of Smiles'.
Lek - The BeginningAt twenty-one years of age, Lek, an ordinary, contemporary, farm girl from the northern Thai Rice belt, had to go to Pattaya to work in the leisure industry to help her widowed mother pay off the mortgage to save the farm from foreclosure and keep her siblings in school. This book, The Beginning, shows what her life was like before she had to leave her small, hard-working, but happy village and the only people she had ever known. It depicts the events that made her happy and those that saddened her in her early life from living with her grandmother to surviving with her husband, Tom. At the very last moment, some friends step up to make Lek's transition to life in Thailand's number one sex city just that little bit easier.
Owen Jones, Amazon Best-Selling Author from Barry, Wales, has lived in several countries and travelled in many more. While studying Russian in the USSR in the '70's, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis. After university, in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup, when he was accused of being a mercenary. Later, while a company director, he joined the crew of four as the galley slave to sail, from Barry to Gibraltar on a home-made concrete yacht during Desert Storm. En voyage, the yacht was almost rammed by a Russian oil tanker, and an American aircraft carrier - The Atlantic Challenger. Since 2004, he has lived mainly in the UK, Spain and Thailand. He now leads a somewhat quieter life in his wife's remote, northern farming village writing, editing and increasing the number of translations, and narrations of his novels.
As he says: "Born in the Land of Song, living in the Land of Smiles".
A Proud Celt
"I am a Celt, and we are romantic", he said when asked about his writing style, "and I firmly believe in reincarnation, Karma and Fate, so, sayings like 'Do unto another...', and 'What goes round comes around' are central to my life and reflected in my work. I write about what I see, or think I see, or dream... and, in the end it is all the same really". He speaks seven languages and is learning Thai, since he lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of seventeen years.
Sneak Preview
