Book after Book

Welcome to the blog tour for This Fragile Earth by Susannah Wise , who kindly accepted to answer my questions about this book and beyond! Hi Susannah! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of This Fragile Earth ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you so much! It’s a very exciting time and I’m thrilled to be here and answering these questions with you. The novel is a deeply grounded science-fiction thriller with at its beating heart the very real love between a mother and son. In near-future London, utilities, water and all communications are suddenly cut off. Signy, a forty-something ex-composer and her six-year-old son Jed are worried, but Matthew her partner is less concerned. When something terrible happens, Signy and Jed flee the city and cycle 100 miles up the motorway to find her mother in a village in Northants. What they find there though, is not what they expect. Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started wr...

Welcome to the blog tour for The High-Rise Diver by Julia Von Lucadou, translated from the German by Sharmila Cohen. More about the book… Riva is a “high-rise diver,” a top athlete with millions of fans, and a perfectly functioning human on all levels. Suddenly she rebels, breaking her contract and refusing to train. Cameras are everywhere in her world, but she doesn’t know her every move is being watched by Hitomi, the psychologist tasked with reining Riva back in. Unquestionably loyal to the system, Hitomi’s own life is at stake: should she fail to deliver, she will be banned to the “peripheries,” the filthy outskirts of society. For readers of  The   Handmaid’s Tale, The Circle , and  Brave New World , this chilling dystopia constructs a world uncomfortably close to our own, in which performance is everything. More about the author… Julia von Lucadou was born in Heidelberg in 1982. She studied film and theater at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and Victoria Uni...

Hi Cecily ! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Long Journey Home ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you! The novel follows the stories of Kate and Edwin, two English friends who meet in Rangoon, Burma, in 1941, just before the Japanese invasion. They become separated and Kate must flee on foot to India, along with many other refugees. In trying to find Edwin, she realises that she has also spent years trying to outrun the past, and that the only way to lay the dead to rest is to make peace with the living. Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started writing the book or did it take an unexpected turn as the characters grew on the page? A: I had no idea where it was going! I began with the city of Rangoon (Yangon), which I visited in 2013, and imagined a young woman living there as war approached. I found the plot developing organically as I wrote. I really admire writers who can form a plot before writing, I ...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Winter Song by Saurav Dutt ! I was drawn to this book because of its Indian setting. Having visited Simla during my honeymoon, I was curious about a book set in that region. The author’s writing style is very rich and evocative and I wasn’t disappointed by its power to transport me to a cold and snowy North-Indian valley in the middle of an English heatwave! And I’ve learnt about an element of travelling to that part of the country, namely the drugs, which I was blissfully unaware of before. But let me share more details about this dark and intense novel… More about the book… From the acclaimed Author of 'The Butterfly Room' comes a powerful afterlife drama conveying how great gifts can be hidden in death and how they can bear fruit in our lives if we have the faith to let them unfold. Somewhere between the mountains and the mist in Simla, India a widower must reconcile himself to the loss and grief that haunts him after the recent death of his...

Photo by Abi Campbell Hi Louise ! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Water Garden ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Hi Silvia! Thanks so much for your good wishes and for hosting this interview on your blog. The Water Garden tells the story of a boy who mysteriously drowns in a Surrey lake and a housewife who becomes drawn to his troubled teenage friend. Woven into the narrative are the voices of other women in the family, including an RAF nurse based in Italy during the Second World War.  Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started writing the book or did it take an unexpected turn as the characters grew on the page? A: This is my second novel and it was written in a very different way to my debut novel, Pomegranate Sky . I wrote several preparatory drafts for my first novel; by the time I was ready to write the final version, I knew everything about the story and the characters. The Water Garden was writt...

Welcome to the blog tour for This is How We Are Human by Louise Beech . More about the book… Sebastian James Murphy is twenty years, six months and two days old. He loves swimming, fried eggs and Billy Ocean. Sebastian is autistic. And lonely. Veronica wants her son Sebastian to be happy, and she wants the world to accept him for who he is. She is also thinking about paying a professional to give him what he desperately wants. Violetta is a high-class escort, who steps out into the night thinking only of money. Of her nursing degree. Paying for her dad’s care. Getting through the dark. When these three lives collide, and intertwine in unexpected ways, everything changes. For everyone. More about the author… Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow-up, The Mountain in My Shoe was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her previous books Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost ...