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...