Book after Book

Happy publication day to Lovers by Fran Clark! Please head over to Instagram for a review of this gorgeous novel, but first enjoy hearing from the author herself… Hi Fran! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of  Lovers ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Lovers charts the dramatic love affair between Charlie and Brenda who meet in a club in London’s Soho in the 1980s. He’s a married man and the love affair is doomed and their story never quite ends. In the same area of London that Charlie and Brenda used to live, a group of people, who didn’t know each other at first, find that their paths cross. These people are all searching for a new life and when they meet their lives change. While they find love and friendship they also find out the ending to Charlie and Brenda’s story. What inspired you to write this novel? A: It was an idea that came to me in lockdown. There is a theory that everyone in the world is somehow connected to every ...

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 ...

About DCR Bond DCR Bond (Debbie) was born in London, but grew up Jamaica, then Zambia, and dimensions of this international upbringing feature in her writing. As a child she was encouraged to write and wanted to nurture her talent and become a journalist. She never did; instead, she studied law, then qualified as an accountant and worked for twenty years in the City. She’s not sure she ever really enjoyed that job. Now freed from the shackles of the day job, DCR Bond has reverted to her childhood passion and loves her new career. Her women's fiction novels are light-hearted, visual, fast-paced, and easy to read, with strong credible and relatable characters. When Debbie is not writing, she can be found playing tennis (badly), bridge (a little better), in the gym, walking her dogs on Exmoor, or tending her garden - she loves cooking her own produce for friends and family. She lives with her husband in rural Devon, surrounded by their miniature bull terriers and s mall flock of free-...

Hi Kaisa! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the upcoming publication of Weather Underwater ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you very much! I would describe the book as a failed love story told as an eco-gothic thriller. It’s about two women with very different backgrounds - Lily and Mia - who develop an intensely codependent bond as teenagers in a care home, drift apart, and meet years later after evacuating from their flooded hometown to London, this time on the opposing sides of a political divide. The setting is a near-future UK where things more or less stay the same before gradually deteriorating. I started writing the book in the autumn of 2020, and it was really an exercise in conveying a particular sense of despair and dread I was feeling at the time. It’s quite a grim book - a desolate shoreline read rather than a sexy beach read - approaching climate change and our political situation as a kind of an ongoing apocalypse. With that be...

Welcome to the book tour for A Notable Omission  by Isabella Muir and enjoy the special treat I have for you: a Q&A with the author! Hi Isabella! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of A Notable Omission ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: A Notable Omission is the fourth novel in the Janie Juke series and here we meet Janie at the start of a new decade - 1970. When we left Janie at the end of The Invisible Case she was enjoying her new found skills and success as an amateur sleuth. Here we meet her a few months later, stealing a few days away from being a wife and mother, attending a local conference at Sussex University, on the topic of women's liberation, to do some soul-searching. But before long Janie and her friend, reporter Libby Frobisher, are thrust into the heart of another mystery when one of the conference delegates goes missing… Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started writing the book o...

Hi Rosa! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Slow Lane Walkers Club ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you very much, Silvia, and thank you for having me on your blog today! Well, The Slow Lane Walkers Club is about Daniel’s reluctant return from Italy to his hometown in Cornwall. To fill a void he starts a walking club and on his first walk, only his eighty year old neighbour, Hazel, shows up. As the walking club grows, so does an unlikely but heartwarming friendship between Daniel and Hazel. A sense of community develops along with a new start for Daniel, one he’d never expected could happen. 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: It’s unusual for me to have an entire plot figured out. I usually start writing with a basic plan in my head, a main character and a good idea of how the story ends. This time the whole...

Hi Robert! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Former Boy Wonder ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: It’s the story of Peter Duffy, a music writer whose life is falling apart. He’s on the cusp of 50, his career has gone down the tube, his marriage is in crisis, and Jack, his teenage son, appears to hate him. Because his work as a high-flying music writer has dried up, he’s been beached at home in Manchester. He used to live what he sees as the high life: touring the world with stadium-filling bands to write features on them for fictionalised versions of magazines like MOJO and UNCUT. While he has been engaged in that, his wife, Lucy, has been getting on with her life and because he's been an absent father, his son is angry with him. That’s the status quo, and then a friend from university days invites him to a party at the manor house where he met his first love, Sanchia Page. All his college friends are going to be there,...

Welcome to the blog tour for Full Wire by J.R. McMenemie! Hi J.R.! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of Full Wire ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A:  Thank you Silvia, and please, call me John. Full Wire is a dystopian sci-fi thriller. It ’ s a story of unrequited love in an age of transhumanism, set against the backdrop of a crime which happens in London in the year 2186. 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 knew where it was headed right from the start, and had the basic structure and plot all down before I began to write. I can ’ t go into specifics without giving away spoilers, but there were times when the characters would make demands of the story and I ’ d have to alter it. However, for the most part they all generally behaved themselves! Was Full Wire your working title? Either way, how did you choose i...

Welcome to the blog tour for The Blue Man by Sue Lumb! Hi Sue! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of The Blue Man ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A:  Thank you for your interest. The Blue Man is a sci fi/fantasy. It tells a story about a scientist who falls overboard  during a storm, he has an underwater encounter with an inexplicable phenomenon. This has a profound and devastating effect. He finds himself in an intimate relationship not only with the inhabitants of a remote island who rescue him, but also with the creature he encountered. It begins to pursue him. He discovers that the creature is from a distant universe, a highly technological race of beings  who use watery  androids for exploratory purposes. They  have made a remarkable discovery in the waters of the Isle Of Manes, an organism which has properties which may help them to delay the impact of a devastating environmental disaster on their planet...

Welcome to the blog tour for A New Dark Age by Ross Patrick! Hi Ross! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of A Dark New Age ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Hi and thank you for your interest. So, A New Dark Age is set in 2061 and follows Esme Sedgebrook, a shy seventeen-year-old who flees her claustrophobic provincial life and the unwelcome prospect of an arranged marriage to join a nascent revolutionary movement and become involved in an uprising that is the chaotic and violent climax to the novel. Although A New Dark Age is a dystopia novel that portrays a society in crisis, the novel is as much about Esme’s rite of passage with personal crisis and change reflected in her changing world. 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 a skeletal outline to provide structure and direction, although this changed during the writ...