Tony Bertauski
AUTHOR

Tony Bertauski

USA Today Bestselling Author.

My writing career began with magazine columns, landscape design textbooks, and a gardening column at the Post and Courier (Charleston, SC). However, I've always fancied fiction.

My grandpa never graduated high school. He retired from a steel mill in the mid-70s. He was uneducated, but he was a voracious reader. I remember going through his bookshelves of paperback sci-fi novels, smelling musty old paper, pulling Piers Anthony and Isaac Asimov off shelf and promising to bring them back. I was fascinated by robots that could think and act like people. What happened when they died?

I'm a cynical reader. I demand the writer sweep me into his/her story and carry me to the end. I'd rather sail a boat than climb a mountain. That's the sort of stuff I want to write, not the assigned reading we got in school. I want to create stories that kept you up late.

Having a story unfold inside your head is an experience different than reading. You connect with characters in a deeper, more meaningful way. You feel them, empathize with them, cheer for them and even mourn. The challenge is to get the reader to experience the same thing, even if it's only a fraction of what the writer feels. Not so easy.

In 2008, I won the South Carolina Fiction Open with Four Letter Words, a short story inspired by my grandfather and Alzheimer's Disease. My first step as a novelist began when I developed a story to encourage my young son to read. This story became The Socket Greeny Saga. Socket tapped into my lifetime fascination with consciousness and identity, but this character does it from a young adult's struggle with his place in the world.

After Socket, I thought I was done with fiction. But then the ideas kept coming, and I kept writing. Most of my work investigates the human condition and the meaning of life, but not in ordinary fashion. About half of my work is Young Adult (Socket Greeny, Claus, Foreverland) because it speaks to that age of indecision and the struggle with identity. But I like to venture into adult fiction (Halfskin, Drayton) so I can cuss. Either way, I like to be entertaining.

And I'm a big fan of plot twists.

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Best Sellers

    • The Roots of Drayton: A Drayton Chronicles Novel

    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
    • Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      0 out of 5 stars 0
    • Performance
      0 out of 5 stars 0
    • Story
      0 out of 5 stars 0

    Drayton can’t leave the Lowcountry. He once believed he was a vampire when he terrorized villages and slaughtered for blood. Now he absorbs essence from the dying’s final breath and rarely stays in one place. He has been in the Lowcountry far too long. Everything is about to change....

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • The Socket Greeny Saga

    • Socket Greeny, Book 1-3
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: Tony Bertauski
    • Length: 22 hrs and 17 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4 out of 5 stars 61
    • Performance
      4 out of 5 stars 58
    • Story
      4 out of 5 stars 58

    The entire Socket Greeny trilogy (Discovery, Training, and Legend) follows a white-haired teenager that discovers he's part of an evolved human race....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • An exceptional sci-fi/tech trilogy

    • By Ms. Christian C. on 08-26-17

    Regular price: $29.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Flury

    • Journey of a Snowman
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: James Killavey
    • Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4.5 out of 5 stars 55
    • Performance
      4.5 out of 5 stars 53
    • Story
      4.5 out of 5 stars 52

    Life hasn't been kind to Oliver Toye. As if juvenile diabetes wasn't enough, he's forced to live with his tyrannical grandmother at the foot of the Rocky Mountains....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • Wonderful Christmas Story for All Ages!

    • By Jerome on 11-27-14

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Claus

    • Legend of the Fat Man
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: James Robert Killavey
    • Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4 out of 5 stars 62
    • Performance
      4 out of 5 stars 62
    • Story
      4 out of 5 stars 60

    In the early 1800s, Nicholas, Jessica, and Jon Santa attempt the first human trek to the North Pole and stumble upon an ancient race of people left over from the Ice Age....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • Wonderful story

    • By cindilla on 12-19-12

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Claus: Rise of the Miser

    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: James Killavey
    • Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      5 out of 5 stars 12
    • Performance
      5 out of 5 stars 12
    • Story
      5 out of 5 stars 12

    Christmas is hot. When Kandi’s dad gets a mysterious call, they fly to a tropical island where the buildings are enormous and the rooms empty....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • Because of Claus ...

    • By Myztikal on 12-28-17

    Regular price: $24.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Foreverland Boxed

    • A Science Fiction Thriller
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: Tony Bertauski
    • Length: 25 hrs and 34 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4 out of 5 stars 23
    • Performance
      4 out of 5 stars 19
    • Story
      4 out of 5 stars 21

    Three books in one collection: The Annihilation of Foreverland; Foreverland Is Dead; and Ashes of Foreverland. When kids awaken on an island, they're told there was an accident....

    • 3 out of 5 stars

    • Foreverland boxed

    • By Deedra on 04-22-17

    Regular price: $29.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • The Annihilation of Foreverland

    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: Paul Licameli
    • Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      3.5 out of 5 stars 43
    • Performance
      3.5 out of 5 stars 42
    • Story
      3.5 out of 5 stars 41

    When kids awake on an island, they're told there was an accident. Before they can go home, they will visit Foreverland, an alternate reality that will heal their minds....

    • 2 out of 5 stars

    • Insanely overdramatic reading

    • By Amazon Customer on 10-21-14

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Halfskin Boxed

    • A Technothriller
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: David Dietz
    • Length: 25 hrs and 20 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4.5 out of 5 stars 14
    • Performance
      4 out of 5 stars 13
    • Story
      4.5 out of 5 stars 13

    Biomites are artificial stem cells that can replace any cell in your body. No more kidney failure, no severed spines or blood disease. No cancer. Pharmaceuticals become obsolete....

    • 4 out of 5 stars

    • Very good story made superb by a fantastic narrati

    • By Lomeraniel on 09-10-16

    Regular price: $29.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Humbug: The Unwinding of Ebenezer Scrooge

    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: James Killavey
    • Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4.5 out of 5 stars 10
    • Performance
      4.5 out of 5 stars 9
    • Story
      4.5 out of 5 stars 9

    Jacob Marley is dead. His business partner, Eb Scrooge, is left to run Avocado, Inc., an innovative technology business, all alone....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • I’ve been Scrooged!

    • By Myztikal on 12-11-17

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

    • Bricks

    • Halfskin, Book 3
    • By: Tony Bertauski
    • Narrated by: David Dietz
    • Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
    • Unabridged
    • Overall
      4.5 out of 5 stars 6
    • Performance
      4.5 out of 5 stars 6
    • Story
      4 out of 5 stars 6

    The Sentience Laws were created to protect the rights of Bricks - fabricated humans - but the laws didn't last long. Banished to a remote gulag called the Settlement....

    • 5 out of 5 stars

    • Bricks

    • By med c on 05-31-16

    Regular price: $19.95

    Free with 30-day Trial

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