Book after Book

Welcome to the blog tour for The Polite Act of Drowning  by Charleen Hurtubise! More about the book… Michigan, 1985. The  drowning of a teenage girl causes ripples in the small town of Kettle Lake, though for most the waters settle quickly. For sixteen-year-old Joanne Kennedy, however, the tragedy dredges up untold secrets and causes her mother to drift farther from reality and her family. When troubled newcomer Lucinda arrives in town, she offers Joanne a chance of real friendship, and together the teenagers push against the boundaries of family, self-image, and their sexuality during the tension of a long, stifling summer. But the undercurrents of past harms continuously threaten to drag Joanne and those around her under... More about the author… Charleen Hurtubise has lived in Dublin, Ireland for over 25 years, having moved from Michigan, USA. She is a teacher and artist as well as a writer, and her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in vario...

Welcome to the blog tour for A Stranger in Baghdad  by Elizabeth Louden! More about the book… One night in 2003, Anglo-Iraqi psychiatrist Mona Haddad has a surprise visitor to her London office, an old acquaintance, Duncan Claybourne. But why has he come? Will his confession finally lay bare what happened to her family before they escaped Iraq? Their stories begin in 1937, when Mona’s mother Diane, a lively Englishwoman newly married to Ibrahim, an ambitious Iraqi doctor, meets Duncan by chance. Diane is working as a nanny for the Iraqi royal family. Duncan is a young British Embassy officer in Baghdad. When the king dies in a mysterious accident, Ibrahim and his family suspect Diane of colluding with Duncan and the British. Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon’s richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage...

Welcome to the blog tour for Arrietty  by Abby Davies! More about the book… Terrified … Arrietty wakes one morning to find her mother gone. Turning to her father for reassurance, she gets the terrifying sense that he - and others - are hiding a crime too dreadful to name. Trapped … Confined to the house on the cliff, Arrietty worries for the safety of her brother as her father becomes increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Truth … Arrietty’s hunt for answers plunges her into a nightmarish fight for survival that leads her to the most awful secret of all. More about the author… Abby Davies was born in Macclesfield in 1984. She grew up in Bedfordshire in a seventeenth century cottage near Flitton Moor and started writing ‘thrillers’ when she was seven years old. After reading English Literature at Sheffield University and training to be an English teacher, she wrote novels in her free time. She was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition in 2018 and longlisted ...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Air Raid Book Club by Annie Lyons! More about the book… As the bombs began to fall, the book club kept their hopes alive... London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the bookshop she and Harry opened together, Gertie is preparing to sell up and move away when she is asked if she would be willing to take in a young Jewish refugee from Germany. Gertie is unsure and when sullen teenager Hedy Fischer arrives, Gertie fears she has nothing left to give the troubled girl. But when the German bombers come and the lights go out over London, Gertie and Hedy realise that joining forces will make them stronger, and that books have the power to bring young and old together and unite a community in need in its darkest hour... More about the author… After a career in booksellin...

Welcome to the blog tour for Lowbridge  by Lucy Campbell! More about the book… Where everybody knows everyone, how can somebody just disappear? 1987: It’s late summer and a time of change when a 17-year-old girl leaves the local shopping centre in the sleepy town of Lowbridge and is never seen again. Her unsolved disappearance is never far from the town’s memory. There’s those who grew up in the shadow of her loss whose own lives were altered forever, and those who know more than they’re saying. 2018: Katherine Ashworth, shattered by the death of her daughter, moves to her husband’s hometown. Searching for a way to pick up the pieces of her life, she joins the local historical society and becomes obsessed with the three-decades-old mystery. As Katherine digs into that summer of 1987, she stumbles upon the trail of a second girl who vanished and was never missed because no one cared enough to see what was happening in plain sight. In a town simmering with divisions and a c...

Welcome to the blog tour for Baby Does A Runner  by Anita Rani! More about the book… Sometimes you need to run, to find out where you really belong. Baby Saul has had it with just about everything. She's fed up with her job and her colleagues, her love life is permanently casual, and underpinning everything is the recent grief of losing her much-loved dad. Oh, and if her mother and the aunties don't stop asking her when she's going to settle down and start having babies, Baby might just lose it. When she finds some love letters between her grandfather and someone who is very clearly not her grandmother, Baby realises that she needs to know more. She heads to India to do some detective work on this mysterious other woman and to find out a bit more about herself along the way. What she doesn't bargain for is Sid, her guide (and unwilling driver) being annoyingly handsome with a knack for asking Baby the sort o...

Welcome to the blog tour for Nameless Lake by Chris Parker! More about the book… Nameless Lake illuminates a life in kaleidoscopic fragments, ranging from the 1970s to the present day, through Britain, France and Germany, encompassing parenthood, art and architecture. It is a novel about the unspoken pressures of gender and desire, told through the shifting dynamics of a lifelong friendship. Emma and Madryn grow up with dreams of escaping their seaside hometown, sustained by an obsession with photography and secret acts of vandalism. But adulthood brings its own limitations, and Emma yearns for connection beyond the constraints of her family. Drawn deeper into Madryn’s private life, Emma feels new possibilities awakening within herself, but when Madryn faces a backlash from her controlling partner, Emma must finally break out of her role as passive observer. More about the author… Chris Parker is a screenwriter for television who has written for shows ranging from EastEnders and Coro...

Welcome to the blog tour for Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena! More about the book… William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he's been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter Avery unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery's family declare her missing. Suddenly Stanhope doesn't feel so safe. And William isn't the only one on his street who's hiding a lie. As witnesses come forward with information that may or may not be true, Avery's neighbours become increasingly unhinged. Who took Avery Wooler? More about the author… Shari Lapena is one of the best-known thriller writers working today. Every one of her thrillers has been a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. She has spent a total of 76 weeks in the top 10 and has sold over 7 million copies across all titles ...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Unheard by Anne Worthington! Please join me as I chat to the author about her novel and more… Hi Anne! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of  The Unheard ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you, Silvia. It’s a pleasure to have this conversation with you. The Unheard is a novel about memory and the experiences that we are unable to leave behind. I trace the trajectory of a man’s life, starting near the end and work backwards so we see the consequences of the events that shaped him rather than the events themselves. They start as distant memories but come into focus by the end. We are put directly into the characters’ heads and get to see and hear the things they cannot share. The novel is full of unheard things… In the first section, Tom Pullan knows the visitors that come to the house are trying to tell him something but he cannot remember what it is. He lives with dementia in the house where ...

Welcome to the blog tour for After Anne  by Logan Steiner! More about the book… As a young woman, Maud had dreams bigger than the whole of Prince Edward Island. Her exuberant spirit had always drawn frowns from her grandmother and their neighbours, but she knew she was meant to create, to capture and share the way she saw the world. And the young girl in Maud’s mind became more and more persistent: Here is my story, she said. Here is how my name should be spelled—Anne with an “e.” But the day Maud writes the first lines of  Anne of Green Gables , she gets a visit from the handsome new minister in town, and soon faces a decision: forge her own path as a spinster authoress, or live as a rural minister’s wife, an existence she once called "a synonym for respectable slavery." The choice she makes alters the course of her life. With a husband whose religious mania threatens their health and happiness at every turn, the secret darkness that Maud he...

Welcome to the blog tour for Heal Your Body and Mind with Yin Yoga  by Miranda Mattig Kumar! More about the book… This simple, well-designed guidebook in English is a detailed handbook to practising Yin Yoga techniques with ease. By viewing the many comprehensive Yin Yoga illustrations, diagrams, and additional interactive online exercise sessions via our YouTube channel all the benefits of Yin Yoga can be accessed. QR codes make it easy to view our introductory videos on our YouTube channel through your mobile phone. Stress, pain and anxiety are all a result of our fast-paced and sometimes impersonal and unforgiving society. If you add a lack of physical activity, recurring ailments like back, hip, or shoulder pain may affect your quality of life. It is important to understand how essential it is to adopt regular movement and activity that helps to reintegrate the mind-body connection. You will then begin to experience the benefit of that integra...

Welcome to the blog tour for Good Husbands  by Cate Ray! More about the book… Three women Jess, Priyanka and Steffi live in Bath, streets away from each other. They are all wives and mothers. They've never met. But they will soon. A letter A stranger sends each of them the same letter. It makes a terrible accusation, and names the other women. A dilemma The three women realise they cannot uncover the truth without the others' help. But what if they don't agree on what to do? And if they do find out the truth, what will they decide to do about it? More about the author… Cate Ray writes suspense novels with compelling moral dilemmas, shining a light on the issues affecting women today. Her stories are created for readers to treasure and share with booklovers everywhere. She is the author of four previous novels of suspense published under the name Cath Weeks. She was named an ‘Author to Watch’ by ELLE. Cate lives in Bath with her family. My impressions… I love a book that is ...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Other Guest  by Heidi Perks! More about the book… Laila and her husband arrive for a week's holiday in Greece in desperate need of a reset. As Laila sits by the pool she finds herself inexplicably drawn to the other family staying in their resort. Em has no idea who Laila is, or that she has been watching her and her teenage sons and husband so intently. Five days later Em's world will be blown apart by a horrifying event. Laila thinks she knows the truth of what happened. But in telling Em what she's seen, she stands to lose everything she holds dear. And what if she's got it wrong? More about the author… Heidi Perks is  the Sunday Times bestselling author of Now You See Her , which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, Come Back for Me, Three Perfect Liars and  The Whispers . The Other Guest  is her fifth novel. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime and thrillers and...

Welcome to the blog tour for The  Unbreakable  Heart of Oliva Denaro by Viola Ardone! More about the book… As provincial Sicily bursts into life with the jaunty hum of pop music and the heady scent of wild jasmine, fifteen-year-old Oliva Denaro dares to challenge convention, ignoring the taunts of peers, her mother’s scolds, and her own changing body. Spirited and carefree, she loves to run until her lungs burst: to feel the strength of her lithe limbs, to relish the freedom she cherishes, to honor the friends forced by propriety to conform. Though she knows she cannot stop growing up, Oliva resists the future. To her, becoming a woman means denying oneself. But adulthood comes all too quickly when the baker’s son sets his sights on her. Offered a blood orange, Oliva—haunted by her mother’s warning, “a girl who smiles has already said yes”—spurns the fruit. Yet, this act sets into motion an unwanted courtship that will force Oliva to fight for the right to choose her own path,...

Welcome to the blog tour for Verona In Autumn  by Tom Lloyd! More about the book… Romeo and Juliet - one of the most famous tales ever told. But what if their violent delights had not ended in tragedy? What then for the star-crossed lovers, doomed to burn so bright and brief? When Romeo Montague fails to kill himself at his wife's side, he and Juliet instead go into exile - far from the rage of their families. Twenty years later they return with their grown children to a city still beset by the unending feud between Montagues and Capulets. Their survival has cost Verona dearly and danger stalks them still, but does their love finally hold the key to ending the city's woes? More about the author… Tom Lloyd was born in 1979 in Berkshire. After a degree in International Relations he went straight into publishing where he still works. He never received the memo about suitable jobs for writers and consequently has never been a kitchen-hand, hospital porter, pigeon hu...

Welcome to the blog tour for The  Three of  Us  by Ore Agbaje-Williams ! More about the book… A nice house, a carefree life, a doting husband, a best friend who never leaves your side. What more could you ask for? There's just one problem: your husband and best friend love you, but they hate each other. Set over a single day, husband, wife and best friend Temi toe the lines of compromise and betrayal. Told in three parts, three people's lives, and their visions of themselves and one another begin to slowly unravel, until a startling discovery throws everyone's integrity into question. Full of intrigue, idiosyncratic wit and a healthy dose of wealth and snobbery  The Three of Us  is part-suburban millennial comedy of manners and part-domestic noir that will leave you wondering: whose side are you on? More about the author… Ore Agbaje-Williams is a British-Nigerian writer from London who has written for gal-dem, Gl...

Happy paperback publishing day to Queuing For the Queen by Swéta Rana ! More about the book… One queue. 250,000 people. Twenty-four life-changing hours. A young boy wearing a cereal box crown, impatiently dragging his mother behind him. A friendly man in a khaki raincoat, talking about his beloved Leeds United to anyone who will listen. An elderly woman who has lived her life alongside the Queen, and is just hoping she’ll make it to the end of the queue to say goodbye. And among them, a British Indian mother and daughter, driven apart by their differences, embarking on a pilgrimage which neither of them yet know will change their lives forever. Full of secrets and surprises, this uplifting novel celebrates not only the remarkable woman who defined an era and a country, but also the diverse and unique people she served for so long. More about the author… Swéta Rana was born into a Gujarati family in Birmingham, and now lives in south London. She studied Philosophy and Theology at Oxford...

Welcome to the blog tour for Homebodies  by Tembe Denton-Hurst! More about the book… Until twenty-four hours ago, Mickey Hayward was living the life she’d always dreamed of: – Working as a full-time writer for a trendy media company  (tick) – In a committed, loving relationship  (tick) Now she’s fired, tossed aside for a younger, more ‘agreeable’ Black writer. Sick of always being overlooked and undervalued, she responds with an online letter detailing the racism she’s faced within the industry. But when it’s met with overwhelming silence, and her girlfriend suggests they go on a break, Mickey’s carefully crafted life starts to fall apart. As Mickey flees to her hometown, the simplicity of her old life – and the arms of an old flame – are all too tempting. But her life in New York refuses to be forgotten. And when a media scandal turns Mickey’s post into a viral sensation, suddenly everyone wants to hear what she has to say. It’s what Mickey’s always wanted – isn’t it? Mo...