It seems only natural that if a bookseller was going to write a novel, it should be about books.

Fortunately that’s exactly what Wivenhoe’s Samuel Fisher has done although The Chameleon, which was released by cool indie publishers Salt this week, is a very different kind of book altogether.

That’s because Samuel’s main character John can become any book, any combination of words, every thought, act and expression that has ever been, or ever will be, written. In The Chameleon John is 800 years old and wants to tell his story. Looking back over his life, from its beginnings with a medieval religious hermit to his current lodgings beside the deathbed of a Cold War spy, John pieces together his tale. The love that held him together and, in particular, the reasons for a murder that took place in Moscow 50 years earlier.

Samuel says: “They say write about what you know and as I run a bookshop it was an obvious choice. In particular I wanted to explore the importance of reading, what it means to people, and the function it has in wider society.

“One of the main themes is how we use stories to tell our own. That’s what the narrator does. He uses the Cold War spy’s story to figure out his own.”

Samuel’s story started in Wivenhoe where he was born and brought up.

Attending the Colchester Boys Grammar School, he last graced the pages of this newspaper as the frontman for the very successful punk rock group, Streetlight Youth.

“I suppose that’s where the writing started,” he tells me, “because I used to write all the lyrics for the band’s songs.

“We had a lot of fun doing it and even got to play Reading but after school we all went our separate ways.”

For Samuel that was Kings College, London, where he studied English, after which he went to work for a publishing company.

“I did that for a couple of years,” he tells me, “and by that time I had started writing the book but eventually it just became too difficult doing editing and then coming back home at the end of the working day to write.”

So Samuel got a job working in a bookshop and after a few years the guy he was working for suggested they open up another job together, Burley Fisher Books located in East London.

“That’s when I started writing in earnest,” he explains. “It was a pretty tough challenge to set myself, having a narrator that is the book, and there were a long series of drafts. Like with anything, I suppose, you only really learn by actually doing it and I learnt a lot writing this book.”

Weaving texts and lives in a family tale that leads the reader on an extraordinary historical journey, The Chameleon, came out this week. Samuel is launching his book at the Wivenhoe Bookshop on Friday, April 27, when he will be in conversation with playwright and Essex University lecturer, Jonathan Lichtenstein. It runs from 6.30pm to 8.30pm and for more information go to www.wivenhoebooks.com