WHEN Malvern writer Keith Bullock raised his glass on New Year's Eve, he had a great deal to celebrate.

Last autumn, he survived a cardiac arrest and then went on to see the launch of his first novel, published by publisher Austin Macauley.

"The entire family were in France for the wedding of my son," he said, "when I collapsed on the eve of the Big Day and had to be shocked back to life by the local fire brigade. Many days followed in intensive care."

When safely back home in Malvern and on the road to recovery, Keith found that the publication of Winning Ticket came as a tremendous morale booster.

"I had had a few previous modest successes, including a piece in the BBC's Book of the Future and a short story Second Honeymoon that was filmed subsequently and shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

"Nothing compared, however, with seeing my name on the front cover of my first novel."

Winning Ticket tells the story of a second-generation Black Country Sikh shopkeeper who steals the lottery ticket of a down-and-out customer.

The ill-gotten fortune soon bears heavily upon his conscience and forces him to confront his values and his ancestral roots. A chance meeting with the man he wronged then spins the narrative off in an entirely new direction.

He said: "The story has many strands. I was an assistant principal at Dudley College for many years and I wanted to give something back. The story is also about lottery winning and Sikhdom and India and the bloody years that followed its partition."

Since retirement, Mr Bullock and his French wifeCatherine have settled happily in Malvern, where he gets his mental gymnastics from the many U3A groups that they have joined there.

He said: "My next novel is set in my native Birmingham. It's called 'Beyond the Sad-faced Clown' and Austin Macauley plan to release it in April, or May. But who knows − the next one might be set in Malvern."