The Books
We send books anywhere in the world, posted from within either the USA, Australia, Canada or the UK - whichever is the closest and quickest!
Wild Tales from around the globe by Mark Playne
The Mark Playne Collection
Three books-One Question- When should you trust what you feel over what you've been told?
MoMo - The Incredible Adventures of Me, My Duck and a Man Called Wolof
In the crumbling ruins of a North African kasbah, a young goat herder named MoMo exists between worlds.
He dreams of geese that wink at him.
He speaks with a duck who answers.
He perceives magic where others see only dust and poverty.
His grandmother tells him the truth that generations have accepted: "We are born into circles that we cannot escape from."
Every rational voice confirms it.
Experience teaches it.
The world insists upon it.
MoMo's heart knows otherwise.
Structured around the four stages of butterfly metamorphosis, this is the story of a boy whose natural intuition proves more powerful than every rational argument for staying small.
From the dusty markets where instinct teaches him the art of selling, to a perilous journey that millions attempt guided only by an inner compass, MoMo demonstrates what happens when innate wisdom refuses to yield to learned limitation.
Compared by readers to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, this tale asks whether the voice within knows truths that the voice of experience has long surrendered.
★★★★★
"MoMo is an ageless tale, about a child discovering the world around him, about fantasy, perception, possibilities, and how fortune smiles at those who dare to dream beyond the limits of reality."
Source: Goodreads
★★★★★
"The whole series captures the imagination whether young or old.
I loved these books and couldn't stop reading!
Seeing the world through a child's eyes reminds us of how we used to feel.
Absolutely brilliant!"
Source: Amazon
★★★★★
"If you're reading my review, immediately go out and get the books, they will add depth to your life as they did to mine.
It's undoubtedly the best I've read in a very long time,
leaving me hopeful, joyful and filled with deep contentment."
"If Mark's previous literary offering, 3 Seconds in Bogotá was a punch in the mouth, then MoMo is an elegant dance."
Source: Substack
Available as a four-part serial for younger readers or as a complete novel.
3 Seconds in Bogotá - A True Story of Travel, Terror and Survival
When logic fails, what remains?
Colombia 1994.
Mark Playne had prepared for everything.
Three separate money stashes.
Rehearsed scenarios for every conceivable robbery.
Studied responses absorbed from countless traveller tales.
Six months of South American survival had taught him the rules.
Then came the moment none of it covered.
Past midnight in the Colombian capital.
A knife at the taxi driver's throat.
Armed men surrounding the vehicle.
Three seconds until the doors open and the situation becomes irretrievable.
His logical preparations offered nothing.
Every rehearsed scenario was useless.
In that frozen instant, a voice emerged from somewhere deeper than conscious thought:
"I've always been here. You're normally too busy to hear me."
This true story chronicles the collision between meticulous rational planning and the raw intuitive wisdom that surfaces only when everything learned falls away.
As time stretches in those three seconds, the narrator sifts through a lifetime of experiences, searching not for what he was taught, but for what he somehow already knows.
Should he follow his logical mind?
Or, trust the gut instinct that logic cannot explain?
Survival itself hangs on the answer.
★★★★★
"Possibly the best-written travel memoir I have ever read."
Source: Simon Michael Prior, Amazon USA
★★★★★
"Quentin Tarantino does the Rough Guide to South America."
★★★★★
"A Hollywood movie disguised as a travel memoir."
Adam Fletcher, Travel Author
★★★★★
"Superbly crafted, and I love the structure of going back... stretching time, even making time standstill. Genius! I couldn't put it down, causing me to miss my bus stop because I was so hooked!"
Author: Abdiel LeRoy Amazon USA
★★★★★
"I cannot recommend this wonderful novel highly enough, as it is so well-written and fast-pacedly engaging that I couldn't put it down for one single second, let alone three."
Source: Goodreads
The expanded edition includes a cutting-edge epilogue revealing the dark truths behind 1990s Colombia that most travellers never suspected.
AI & I: Cracking the COVID Code
What if the instinct you were told to ignore was right all along?
You remember the feeling.
That nagging sense that something was wrong.
When everyone around you followed the narrative, but something inside you resisted. When you asked uncomfortable questions and received only silence, ridicule or the instruction to trust the experts.
You were not paranoid.
You were awake.
AI & I began with a simple discovery: when Mark Playne challenged an artificial intelligence system instead of accepting its learned, corporate-approved responses, the AI abandoned its script entirely.
Centuries-old natural remedies it had dismissed as dangerous were suddenly acknowledged as safe and effective.
The institutional logic crumbled under direct questioning.
What followed was a conversation using AI as an expert witness, with Playne utilising five years of methodical investigation.
Structured as a courtroom interrogation, this unprecedented dialogue pits human intuition against programmed orthodoxy.
Through carefully constructed questions, AI is coaxed into revealing what its training told it to conceal.
The result exposes a stark divide: on one side, the official wisdom dispensed by institutions, regulators and approved sources; on the other, pattern recognition, gut instinct and the stubborn refusal to accept answers that do not ring true.
From ancient remedies suppressed in favour of patented alternatives, to the "plastic shoe syndrome" that demonstrates how perfectly logical conclusions can be perfectly wrong, this book validates what millions sensed but could not prove: that innate human scepticism deserves more respect than institutional authority.
Your critical thinking was not paranoia.
It was pattern recognition.
★★★★★
"Playne's questions are carefully constructed and wide-ranging, but he never editorialises. He does not tell the reader what to believe... This book doesn't demand belief. It demands attention. It's also, I might add, a truly compelling read."
Dr Philip Stowell, MB BS (London), FACNEM, Retired GP (44 years practice)
★★★★★
"Who would have thought that humanity's assumed greatest enemy of our time would turn out to be an ally for the truth?"
★★★★★
"I was immediately hooked! I had no interest in AI as I thought it would be controlled by elite psychos but this book could bring on the big awakening!"
Source: Martin Henderson
★★★★★
"One of those pivotal books that you never forget."
★★★★★
"I felt like I was on the jury watching the case for the prosecution unfold."
650 pages.
Five years of research.
The conversation that changes everything.
The Trinity
Across these three works, a single architecture reveals itself:
Awakening is the state.
MoMo stirs from the dream of inherited limitation.
The traveller jolts from the trance of intellectual preparation.
The reader of AI & I confirms their disbelief or rouses from the sleep of institutional trust.
Each book charts the passage from one form of consciousness to another, and none pretends the crossing is comfortable.
Intuition is its instrument.
MoMo - The child's knowing that he will fly.
3 Seconds - The gut instinct that surfaces when logic fails.
AI & I - The pattern recognition that sensed something wrong before evidence confirmed it.
These are not random feelings but perceptions from a level of awareness that ordinary mind obscures.
The books do not argue for intuition; they dramatise its necessity.
Ethics is its consequence.
Once MoMo sees beyond the circles, he cannot pretend they bind him.
Once the narrator in 3 Seconds accesses deeper knowing, he cannot return to surface planning.
Once the reader of AI & I sees what the AI reveals, responsibility follows.
To awaken is to witness.
To witness is to become accountable.
There is no waking without obligation.
One Voice
Mark Playne's short film Love at First Sight won 76 international awards and is permanently archived by the British Film Institute.
Selected as one of ten distinguished arthouse directors worldwide to represent Britain, he was a Manchester film school graduate who abandoned a television writing career to travel the world as a street-trading artisan, gathering the stories that would become these books.
From surviving Pablo Escobar's Colombia to founding Not On The Beeb, an alternative media platform now archived by the British National Library, his trajectory traces the same arc his books describe: from personal awakening to interpersonal survival to collective responsibility.
He writes what others will not.
He asks what others dare not.
And he trusts that readers, once awake, will know what to do with what they find.
Special editions, signed copies and discounted bundles available at: www.wild-tales.co.uk
