He was a good friend of mine. But the song got him wrong.
Brack is old now, older than he had any business getting, and the young frogs who share his water no longer understand what he says. That does not trouble him as much as it once might have. Long ago, when he was young and broken by grief, he too entered a strange water where nothing made sense — and there he met Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was an old bullfrog of the Deepwater. His voice was low, round, ancient and completely untranslatable. No creature understood a word he said. Yet those who sat near him found themselves changed. The lonely were less alone. The frightened remembered how to stay. The grieving learned that silence could be a door as well as a wall.
After drought destroys the small pond of his birth, Brack crosses the dry land carrying the silence of his mother, the loss of his first friend, and the guilt of those he could not save. In the great water beyond, he finds danger, fear, quarrels, hunger, old legends, a strange human visitor, and the one friendship that will teach him how to live again.
Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog is a lyrical adult fable about grief, survival, language, climate, memory and the mystery of being loved without being understood. It is a story of what is lost when a world dries, what remains when words fail, and what it means to sing joy into the dark on purpose.
For readers who love literary fiction, animal allegory, philosophical fables and emotionally resonant stories of unlikely friendship.
Greg Mincher has spent more than thirty years in wine - a trade that runs on patience, on attention to small and uncounted things, and on the faith that dry years turn good again. Born and raised in Sydney, he now lives and writes in Pokolbin, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where he planted a Shiraz vineyard in 2000 and founded The Vintry, his award-winning accommodation built as a modern gathering place in the old sense - somewhere wine becomes a medium for connection, conversation, and memory.His wine credentials include Comité Champagne Professional certification and Wine & Spirit Education Trust Diploma studies, and he is the author of several wine titles, including Champagne Confidence, Champagne Revealed, and How Cold is Too Cold?. His fiction ranges widely: the Quantum Wine novels blend the wine world with speculative thriller, while Jeremiah Was aBullfrog- his first fable - turns to a dying wetland, an old bull-frog, and the untold story behind a line everyone knows. He writes and publishes under the Vintry Editions imprint. Across everything he makes, his aim is the same: to inform, to educate, and to entertain. His daughter, Isabella, is building her own path in the world, with the same determination and independence he most admires. The door remains open, always.
