Breaking Free is a present-day adventure story in which the action takes place mostly on one of the more than seven thousand small islands of Indonesia but also on the high seas between Singapore and Sydney, Australia. Alex Blackwood is a Brooklyn born man from Indiana who has seen the gutter from close up in his hometown and again in New York City and in Amsterdam and in Bangkok where he finally hits bottom. To keep from getting drawn into more involvement with drugs and trafficking he has to set himself adrift in a sailing dinghy in the Timor Sea six hundred miles northwest of Australia and one hundred miles south of Bali. He gets to an island whose inhabitants are slaves and to thank them for saving his life he uses Yankee ingenuity to alleviate their bleak lives and later, using raw courage, to try to free them the hard way. When he arrives on the island he finds that the only real pleasure in life for the slaves comes from having sex and to not describe their methods of enhancing and proloning that pleasure would be as ludicrous as not describing their day-to-day lives or their diet or their suppressed tribal customs. Chapters - 8, 10, 11, 16, 27, 29, 43 and 63 is provided at the end of the book to bring the squeamish and/or prudish reader up-to-date with the ongoing story line although this evasion is, at best, unsatisfactory because the 'love stool' - whether it's an actual stool inside their huts or the stump of a tree or an upturned crate, or whatever, outside in the open - plays an even more important role in their lives as slaves than it did when they were free. Because of this, the reader is urged to gird up his or her loins, so to speak, and bravely stay with the main text.

Praise for Roy Garde's first novel "Breaking Free" (2005).

Critics were generally positive and some made comparisons that ranged from the raw-"Robinson Crusoe meets Rambo" to the over flattering-"The novel that a collaboration between H.E. Bates and John Updike might have produced."

When asked his opinion of them Mr. Garde said, "I never read any reviews if the critic's name is in larger print than the name of the author of the book. With the exception of Mr. Anon, of course."

After listening to some excerpts over the phone he said, "Far too much nit-picking but overall they seem to be positive, as you said, and that's good to know but many readers who felt the need to contact me, via the publisher, used the phrase-"A Good Read." I don't expect, or want, anything better than that except, maybe, to have it combined with some variation of-"I Couldn't Put It Down."

Praise for Roy Garde's first novel Breaking Free (2005). Critics were generally positive and some made comparisons that ranged from the raw-"Robinson Crusoe meets Rambo" to the over flattering-"The novel that a collaboration between H.E. Bates and John Updike might have produced." When asked his opinion of them Mr. Garde said, "I never read any reviews if the critic's name is in larger print than the name of the author of the book. With the exception of Mr. Anon, of course." After listening to some excerpts over the phone he said, "Far too much nit-picking but overall they seem to be positive, as you said, and that's good to know but many readers who felt the need to contact me, via the publisher, used the phrase-"A Good Read." I don't expect, or want, anything better than that except, maybe, to have it combined with some variation of-"I Couldn't Put It Down."