Book after Book

Hi Fenella! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Reading Party . Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you! The simplest is to say that it’s a love story about a woman trying to make her way in a man’s world. But the setting and the period are significant: It’s Oxford, where the main character, Sarah Addleshaw, is a feisty young academic; and it’s the 1970s, when women were just being admitted to male colleges. So Sarah faces the double challenge of being the first ‘Fellow’ in the college she joins and also of hosting its first mixed student retreat to Cornwall. The pressures on her to set a good example are acute – and then she goes and falls for ‘the wrong person’.   Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started writing or did it develop before your eyes as the characters grew on the page and did something that you were not expecting? A: Absolutely not the first and only a bit of the second! I st...

By Fenella Gentleman Published by Muswell Press Synopsis: It is the seventies and the colleges of Oxford are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female Fellow. Impulsive love affairs with people, places and the ideas in her head beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact. Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date. How did this book end up in my hands? I was offered a date on the blog tour organised by RandomThingsTours and I was quick to accept it. I was sold after reading the first sentence of the synopsis! Was it a p...