`Slaithwaite is centre of a brave new world'.

Byline: Tony Pogson ,

The story of The Game Players Of Slaithwaite, the first novel by Huddersfield-born author Denis Hellewell, is quite frankly a fantastic one, a strange world indeed, where events that are already happening now are projected forward to further extremes in a distant future.

Global warming and a rise in sea-levels? It's already happened. That's why we have Rochdale docks and Welsh islands, why Cleckheaton, Mirfield and Heckmondwike have been lost under the waters along with Holland, the Isle of Man and Liverpool for instance.

Cloning? How else do you think that Libya could have won soccer's World Cup, beating Brazil. Mind you, that did spark off the Football Wars, with some of the bigger European football clubs, so rich by then that they rivalled the big corporations.

Shame for Spain really that they had the biggest clubs. Their legacy from all this was a devasted country, left with an 11-month winter so that now the Spaniards come to Britain for our sunshine.

The genetically modified food experiment had failed, leaving mainland Britain with a contaminated soil and reliant on the Orkney vegetable plantations, although in fairness there was another spin-off from this scientific dabbling with nature - in the form of 3ft long mice and the wolf spiders.

In this brave new world the major corporate players are GlobeNet and WilCon locked in a relentless struggle for superiority. ("Think IBM v Microsoft", says Denis helpfully.)

It is in this situation that WilCon gets the inspired idea of starting an elite academy at Slaithwaite, overlooking Scamadam (better known to us as Scammonden).

Like all students everywhere they are a hard-drinking lot, even if the trend of girls outperforming boys has continued to the extent that there are 123 girls in one class to 17 boys.

And they begin to question what is happening around them, for example the advent of the virtual reality machine and the theory of readable time which allows a tinkering with the truth.

For a start, the records showed that sending star England footballer Joanne Liddell back to 1966 enabled England to turn a 4-2 defeat by Germany into a 4-2 win.

Denis Hellewell says he is not only Huddersfield-born he was born into an established Huddersfield family.

The 53-year-old says it took him two years to write the book, which was published by the US firm AuthorHouse and is available in this country via Amazon.

Professionally he is a high flier having undertaken numerous interim, programme and change management roles within public sector, financial services, public utilities, oil and gas, telecommunications, airlines and professional services organisations, many of these assignments being carried out on a global scale.

He also knows a thing or two about the selling of books. Denis and his wife Karen run the expanding Well Wisher Bookshop at Devizes in Wiltshire.

The bookshop, which specialises in educational and children's books, is on a shortlist of 20 independent bookshops from which six regional winners will be selected for the Aurum Press Independent Bookseller of the Year Award.

The award will be presented at the British Book Trade Awards event at the BA Conference on Tuesday, May 9.

* The Game Players Of Slaithwaite. Denis Hellewell/AuthorHouse.