Book after Book

Welcome to the blog tour for The Wartime Book Club  by Kate Thompson! More about the book… Jersey, 1943. Once a warm and neighbourly community, now German soldiers patrol the cobbled streets, imposing a harsh rule on the people of the island. Grace La Mottée, the island's only librarian, is ordered to destroy books which threaten the new regime. Instead, she hides the stories away in secret. Along with her headstrong best friend, postwoman Bea Rose, she wants to fight back. So she forms the wartime book club: a lifeline, offering fearful islanders the joy and escapism of reading. But as the occupation drags on, the women's quiet acts of bravery become more perilous - and more important - than ever before. And, when tensions turn to violence, they are forced to face the true, terrible cost of resistance… More about the author… Kate Thompson was born in London and worked as a journalist for twenty years on women's magazines and national ne...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Sleeping Beauties  by Lucy Ashe! More about the book… May 1945 and at long last, Rosamund Caradon is feeling optimistic. As she returns the last few evacuees to London from her Devonshire manor, she vows to protect dance-obsessed daughter Jasmine from further peril. But a chance meeting with a Sadler’s Wells ballet dancer changes everything. When the beautiful, elusive Briar Woods bursts into Rosamund’s train carriage, it’s clear her sights are set on the immediately captivated Jasmine. And Rosamund cannot shake the eerie feeling this accidental encounter is not what it seems. For Briar may be far away from the pointe shoes and greasepaint of the Sleeping Beauty ballet that is so much a part of her, but her performance for Rosamund might just be her most successful yet. This, Briar feels, is a show for a mother and daughter. A dance that could turn deadly… More about the author… After training at the Royal Ballet School for ...

Welcome to the blog tour for Point Zero  by Seichõ Matsumoto, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai! More about the book… Tokyo, 1958. Teiko marries Kenichi Uhara, ten years her senior, an advertising man recommended by a go-between. After a four-day honeymoon, Kenichi vanishes. Teiko travels to the coastal and snow-bound city of Kanazawa, where Kenichi was last seen, to investigate his disappearance. When Kenichi’s brother comes to help her, he is murdered, poisoned in his hotel room. Soon, Teiko discovers that her husband’s disappearance is tied up with the so-called “pan-pan girls”, women who worked as prostitutes catering to American GIs after the war. Now, ten years later, as the country is recovering, there are those who are willing to take extreme measures to hide that past. More about the author… Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1982) was Japan's most successful mystery writer. His first detective novel,  Points and Lines , sold over a million copies in Jap...

Welcome to the blog tour for Mongrel by Hanako Footman! More about the book… Mei loses her Japanese mother at age six. Growing up in suburban Surrey, she yearns to fit in, suppressing not only her heritage but her growing desire for her best friend Fran. Yuki leaves the Japanese countryside to pursue her dream of becoming a concert violinist in London. Far from home and in an unfamiliar city, she finds herself caught up in the charms of her older teacher. Haruka attempts to navigate Tokyo's nightlife and all of its many vices, working as a hostess in the city's sex district. She grieves a mother who hid so many secrets from her, until finally one of those secrets comes to light... Shifting between three intertwining narratives,  Mongrel  reveals a tangled web of desire, isolation, belonging and ultimately, hope. More about the author… Hanako Footman is a British-Japanese actor and author living in London. Mongrel  is her debut novel. My impressions… My, oh my, what a...

Welcome to the blog tour for Murder in the Library by Anita Davison ! More about the book… 1916, London: Keen to support the war effort, bookshop manager and sometime amateur sleuth Hannah Merrill has taken a volunteer role in the library of the nearby military hospital. But arriving at the hospital one cold winter’s morning, she is horrified to find the body of a dead soldier in the library. What’s more, a beautiful young nurse confides in Hannah that she thinks she’s being followed, and then she abruptly disappears. Hannah can’t shake the suspicion that the two cases are connected, but she can’t solve the case alone. She’ll once again need to call upon her delightful, demanding, only-occasionally devious aunt, Violet. The two women know they must find the missing nurse before it’s too late… but they don’t realise they’re now both in the killer’s sights. More about the author… My impressions… After Murder in the Bookshop , this is the second book in the Miss Merrill and Aunt Violet my...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Lost Letters of Evelyn Wright by Clare Swatman ! More about the book… Starting over can be hard to do… So when mum of two Beth moves out of her beloved marital home and into an unloved and unkempt cottage, she can’t help but feel demoralised. Faced with months of DIY and dust, her children Jacob and Olivia aren’t impressed either. But when Beth finds a box of letters while she’s clearing out the children’s room, things start to look up. The correspondence is decades old, between agony aunt Evelyn and those in need of solace. Intrigued as to why the letters have been kept safe all these years, Beth can’t resist reading them, and as the wisdom and kindness of Evelyn falls off the pages, so Beth starts to feel she has a friend and champion in this woman she has never met. Good advice doesn’t age, and as life starts to look brighter, Beth begins to wonder if she could track down Evelyn and thank her for her help. But as Beth uncovers more about Evelyn’s st...

Welcome to the blog tour for Mr Magenta  by Christopher Bowden! More about the book… Stephen Marling thought he knew his aunt Flora. But when he inherits her house in a quiet south London square a series of discoveries among her papers brings to light another person entirely. Who, for example, is ‘Mr Magenta’ and what part did he play in her life? In the process of uncovering the secrets of one life, Stephen is forced to re-evaluate his own and decide what he really wants. Was he right to turn his back on Nancy Steiner, the young actress he met in New York, when he came home to take up his inheritance? Interweaving past and present, the story takes him from a Brooklyn bookshop to a theatre in Marseille to a cottage on the east coast of England where the truth about Mr Magenta is finally revealed. More about the author… Christopher Bowden lives in south London. His six previous novels are The Red House, The Blue Book, The Yellow Room, The Green Door, The Pur...

Welcome to the blog tour for Last Seen In Havana by Teresa Dovalpage ! More about the book… A Cuban American woman searches for her long-lost mother and fights to restore a beautiful but crumbling Art Deco home in the heart of Havana in this moving, immersive new mystery, perfect for fans of Of Women and Salt . In 2019, newly widowed baker Mercedes Spivey flies from Miami to her native Cuba to care for her ailing paternal grandmother. Mercedes’s life has been shaped by loss, beginning with the mysterious unsolved disappearance of her mother when Mercedes was a little girl. Returning to Cuba revives Mercedes’s hopes of finding her mother as she attempts to piece together the few scraps of information she has. Could her mother still be alive? 33 years earlier, an American college student with endless political optimism falls deliriously in love with a handsome Cuban soldier while on a spontaneous visit to the island. She decides to stay permanently, but soon discovers that nothing is as...