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Showing posts from February, 2023

Blog tour: In the Meantime

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Welcome to the blog tour for In the Meantime by Alex Fragnière! More about the book… A Syrian refugee with a special gift but who is hiding a dark secret. A gay man struggling with childhood ghosts. A harassed mother of two whose husband she suspects is having an affair and a handsome social influencer trying to make a difference. These are among eight apparently unconnected people who find themselves in hospital after becoming infected with Covid. As they drift in and out of consciousness, their lucid, sometimes terrifying, often hilarious visions take each of them on a retrospective journey revealing the circumstances that led them to a hospital bed. Those visions also provide them with a mysterious glimpse into an ‘alternative’ life they could have lived had one moment in their past played out slightly differently. Set in the north of England but spanning across many corners of the world including Tobago, Northern Cyprus, Poland and Syria, In the Meantime is a novel that explores

Blog tour: this could be everything

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Welcome to the blog tour for this could be everything by Eva Rice! More about the book… It’s 1990. The Happy Mondays are in the charts, a fifteen-year-old called Kate Moss is on the cover of the Face magazine, and Julia Roberts wears thigh-boots for the poster of a new movie called Pretty Woman. February Kingdom is nineteen years old when she is knocked sideways by family tragedy. Then one evening in May, she finds an escaped canary in her kitchen and it sparks a glimmer of hope in her. With the help of the bird called Yellow, Feb starts to feel her way out of her own private darkness, just as her aunt embarks on a passionate and all-consuming affair with a married American drama teacher. THIS COULD BE EVERYTHING is a coming-of-age story with its roots under the pavements of a pre-Richard-Curtis-era Notting Hill that has all but vanished. It’s about what happens when you start looking after something more important than you, and the hope a yellow bird can bring … More about the auth

In conversation with... Kaisa Saarinen

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Hi Kaisa! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the upcoming publication of Weather Underwater ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you very much! I would describe the book as a failed love story told as an eco-gothic thriller. It’s about two women with very different backgrounds - Lily and Mia - who develop an intensely codependent bond as teenagers in a care home, drift apart, and meet years later after evacuating from their flooded hometown to London, this time on the opposing sides of a political divide. The setting is a near-future UK where things more or less stay the same before gradually deteriorating. I started writing the book in the autumn of 2020, and it was really an exercise in conveying a particular sense of despair and dread I was feeling at the time. It’s quite a grim book - a desolate shoreline read rather than a sexy beach read - approaching climate change and our political situation as a kind of an ongoing apocalypse. With that be

Blog tour: River Sing Me Home

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Welcome to the blog tour for River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer! More about the book… Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations. The faces Rachel cannot forget. It's 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear. With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea. Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home. More about the author… Eleanor Shearer is a mixed race writer from the UK. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the coast of Kent, so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. As the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants who came to the UK as pa