Book after Book

Welcome back to Blind Date With a Book Thursday… even if it’s Friday morning! Thank you all for joining in the fun and sharing your guesses on Twitter or on the blog. I hope you enjoyed yourselves! A quick look at the clues: I was published in 2011 and I am a debut novel I was written by a female British writer I am set in London One of my main characters is... a department store There is romance among my pages I tell you all about a Christmas miracle My heroine transforms herself from ugly duckling to beautiful swan (but not literally!) Any last-minute guesses? No? Ok, here we go… This week’s book was… Miracle on Regent Street by Ali Harris. A good read at any time of the year, I first reviewed this book in December 2011 and you can read all about it here . I hope to see you next week for some more fun!

By Ali Harris Published by Simon & Schuster Who doesn’t enjoy curling up with a good book when a storm rages outside? I certainly do. I must admit, however, that my choice of wintry reading normally falls on reinventions of modern classics, like Carol Ann Duffy’s The Night Before Christmas , or chills-down-the-spine kind of stories, like Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts . With Miracle on Regent Street , Ali Harris opened up a whole new world for me of Christmas tales for old-fashioned modern women - if you allow me the oxymoron! The heroine of this novel is one such woman. Her name is Evie Taylor and she works as stockroom manager at Hardy’s, an elegant London department store that has seen better days. Relegated to the stockroom, Evie would like to work on the shop floor and has big dreams for Hardy’s, a place that – being where her parents fell in love – has always had a special meaning for her. Her dreams, however, might never come true. If the profits don’t increase, Mr Hardy wil...

Hello Ali! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of your first novel, Miracle on Regent Street . Can you tell us what it is about? A: Thank you so much! I still can’t believe it’s actually happening and that people might (hopefully) buy it! Miracle on Regent Street is a story about a sweet, unassuming stockroom girl called Evie Taylor who works in the basement of Hardy's, a faded, forgotten old department store that has seen better days. For the past two years she's lived an invisible life in London, sorting endless boxes of archaic stock by day and looking after her sister’s two young children at night. Her neighbours think she's the hired help, her self-obsessed shop floor colleagues mistake her for her stockroom predecessor and even her manager doesn't know her actual name. But despite all this she loves working at the store. So when she overhears that Hardy's is at risk of being sold unless it seriously increases its profits she hatc...