don darkes Profile

Don Darkes is a pseudonym. I am Lawrence de Robillard, ecstatically married to my incredible wife Anne who has put up with me for more than 3 decades and who gave me three miracle children. I repudiated my Psychology degree in the mid-seventies prior to serving mandatory National Military Service in a top-secret unit stationed in (then) Rhodesia -for which I received a medal. (The subject of a novel in progress) During the eighties, at the height of apartheid, together with (then illegal)“black” partners I built a successful manufacturing company which I sold to buy the yacht upon which I was shipwrecked together with my wife, our five year old son and four year old daughter. After returning destitute to South Africa I rode a ripple in the dot.com wave then sold my Internet start-up in order to distribute the rare organic chocolate and to research a challenging historical novel that explores an intriguing link between the Jewish Holocaust and Madagascar. Currently, together with my wife, son and two daughters we reside high off the ground amongst the branches of a Casuarina tree (no kidding) as the family builds another yacht and I work on several books that have as a common denominator my love of history and my belief that fact is stranger and far more interesting than fiction.