Jennie Ensor's Blog, page 9

So dreams do come true after all! #FridayFeeling

This will be my second blog post in one day – unheard of for me

#BlogTour #BookReview #SeasOfSnow by @zinca #paperback #launch @unbounders

For my sins I have the Friday the 13th (morning) slot of the Seas Of Snow blog tour, which celebrates the paperback release of the debut novel by Kerensa Jennings. So here’s my review of this startling, beautifully written and hard-to-categorise novel. This review was first on my blog on 18 April 2017.

In the interests of full disclosure:

a. I’ve met Kerensa several times and have found her to be a wonderful person

b. Our debut novels are both published by Unbound – hers by the allsingingalldancing version aka @Unbounders and mine by the fine chaps at @Unbound_Digital.

Book blurb

[image error]1950s England. Five-year-old Gracie Scott lives with her Mam and next door to her best friend Billy. An only child, she has never known her Da. When her Uncle Joe moves in, his physical abuse of Gracie’s mother starts almost immediately. But when his attentions wander to Gracie, an even more sinister pattern of behaviour begins.

As Gracie grows older, she finds solace and liberation in books, poetry and her enduring friendship with Billy. Together they escape into the poetic fairy-tale worlds of their imaginations.

But will fairy tales be enough to save Gracie from Uncle Joe’s psychopathic behaviour – and how far will it go?

Seas of Snow is a haunting, psychological domestic drama that probes the nature and the origins of evil.

 

My thoughts

Seas of Snow is very dark in its subject matter and is, in parts, bleak, disturbing, chilling and horrific. However, these aspects are offset by the beauty of much of the prose, which imparts a certain magical quality, and the character of Gracie, the child at the centre of the story. The setting for the early strand of the novel is northern England in the 1950s, when people could not talk as openly about many things as they can today. The plot is cleverly constructed, switching between characters and going back and forth in time, leading to a surprise ending.

We see how Gracie and her single mother try to cope with the intrusion of the psychopathic uncle Joe into their lives. Gracie’s Ma (Joe’s sister) has the support of neighbours, yet seems to be powerless to defend herself and her child. Gracie’s playmate Billy helps her to create imaginary worlds where the princess is rescued, and good triumphs over evil. She also takes refuge in poetry, especially the words of the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Gracie is enchanting, an almost angelic child. In contrast, Uncle Joe is depicted as a callous, brutal man without a conscience, intent on finding and devouring his prey (a raven metaphor permeates Seas of Snow). His motivation and backstory is woven into the plot, and suspense builds as we learn more about the darkness at his core. Fortunately, much of the violence is left to the reader’s imagination. By the later stages of the story though, I admit that I found the unrelenting physical detail of Uncle Joe’s pathology somewhat excessive. This was one of the few negatives I had about the book. (The other, fairly minor, was the vagueness of the timeframe, which led to a haziness sometimes about what month and year it was.)

Seas of Snow is a brave, lyrical, powerful novel that mercilessly and brilliantly dissects the evil at the core of one man, and its impact on those who have the misfortune to cross his path. It is certainly not for those squeamish about violence, in particular sexualised violence. Yes, the novel makes us wonder how a person becomes ‘good’ or ‘bad’. More than that though, it asks to what extent any of us may be complicit in the terrible acts of others.

Author bio

[image error]Kerensa Jennings is a storyteller, strategist, writer, producer and professor. Kerensa’s TV work took her all over the world, covering everything from geo-politics to palaeontology, and her time as Programme Editor of Breakfast with Frost coincided with the life-changing events of 9/11. The knowledge and experience she gained in psychology by qualifying and practising as an Executive Coach has only deepened her fascination with exploring the interplay between nature and nurture and with investigating whether evil is born or made – the question at the heart of Seas of Snow. As a scholar at Oxford, her lifelong passion for poetry took flight. Kerensa lives in West London and over the last few years has developed a career in digital enterprise.

IN HER OWN WORDS…

“I’ve been writing stories and poems ever since I was a little girl. Although it’s taken me a long time to get around to writing a book, I’m lucky enough to have had a long career in the media as a TV producer, writing television programmes. Most of the time viewers would have had no idea who I was, but my words have informed, educated and entertained millions over the years. I produced, directed, wrote for and worked with some of the most amazing people including Nelson Mandela, Sir David Frost (I was Programme Editor of Breakfast with Frost), Sir David Attenborough, Fiona Bruce, Sian Williams, James Nesbitt, George Alagiah and Rory Bremner. I moved away from programme making to strategy and became the BBC’s Head of Strategic Delivery where I designed and delivered strategies for the Corporation, including a significant digital strategy (BBC Make it Digital). I now run The Duke of York Inspiring Digital Enterprise Award.

I’ve always used literature, and poetry in particular, for solace and escape. I happen to think literature is probably the best self-help on the planet! You can fly into other worlds and find ways through writing to make sense of life. SEAS of SNOW draws together some of my passions and fascinations in life. While I was at university, I studied the psychoanalysis of fairy tales and got very interested in archetypes and the way characters and stories of good and evil are portrayed.

While leading the BBC News coverage of the Soham investigation, I had the opportunity to see first-hand a lot of evidence about the mind and motives of a psychopath. So in SEAS of SNOW, the protagonist Gracie uses poetry and playtime to escape the traumas and abuses of her life; the antagonist, her Uncle Joe, is a bad man, a psychopath; and there is a subtext of fairy tale underlying the page-turning scenario which hopefully makes you want to read while half covering your eyes.”

Social media links

Website: http://www.seasofsnow.com

Facebook author page

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zinca

Buy the book

Foyles: bit.ly/Foyles-SeasofSnow-KerensaJennings

Waterstones: bit.ly/Waterstones-SeasofSnow-Kerensa...

Amazon UK: bit.ly/AmUK-SeasofSnow-KerensaJennings

Amazon US: bit.ly/AmUS-SeasofSnow-KerensaJenning

Check out the SOS Blog Tour

Well done for making it all the way down to here (yes, it’s a long post!)

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Review: SAL by Mick Kitson

[image error]I don’t often cry when reading but close to the end of SAL I couldn’t stop the tears. This a stand-out novel that I plucked on a whim from Netgalley (my thanks to the publisher, Canongate). Mick Kitson’s debut novel, (published in March in hardback) is literary fiction with an element of crime fiction – it’s also a coming of age novel narrated in the highly distinctive voice of 13-year-old Sal, who has fled from neglect and abuse to the wilderness of the Forest of Galloway, Scotland with her younger half-sister Peppa.

I admit that early in the first chapter, the precisely detailed, emotion-avoidant account by a girl who apparently has some form of autistic disorder had me going ‘What the heck?’ But by the end of the first chapter, when Sal casually slips in what she did to her alcoholic mother’s abusive drug-addict boyfriend – I was hooked. In this chapter we learn that Robert the boyfriend has been sexually abusing Sal since she was 10; Sal fears he will start abusing Peppa soon. After months of meticulously planning their escape (reading the SAS survival handbook, reading Wikipedia entries and watching Ray Mears videos on You Tube on how to start fires and make shelters out of trees) Sal sets off to the UK’s ‘last great wilderness’ with Peppa, a Bear Grylls knife and other essential provisions in a couple of rucksacks.

*POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT*

Oh yes, and before leaving the house she kills Robert, making sure that the police will know she was the one responsible. After talking about killing rabbits she says: “I wouldn’t mind killing one. I had never killed one. Or anything apart from Robert.” I was worried about giving too much away by referring to this, but have as it’s pretty important and comes early on, at the end of chapter one. (One of my few criticisms of the novel is that I didn’t feel that Sal’s motive for this was sufficiently strong, or sufficiently explained.)

*END OF ALERT*

The story begins a short period after the sisters arrived in the forest (visible from space as a dark patch, apparently, also a Dark Sky park for the astronomically minded). Sal has carefully chosen the exact spot in the forest and plans to survive there indefinitely. No one knows where they are, Sal hopes, especially the police who she thinks may well be after them. There’s copious detail about making ‘benders’ (out of larch and spruce I think) to sleep in and other survival stuff, which girly types may be tempted to skip. Not just women of course. However, I found some of the information quite interesting, and you never know when it might come in handy

Not slacking off, really

Just had a nudge from FB that I should make my author presence known. And there’s been nothing on my blog for a while, oh dear…

My excuse for tardiness in posting anything is that I’ve been busy getting my second novel MS ready and submitting to publishers – and preparing a plan for self publishing later this year should that turn out to be the best option. (More about this in later weeks, I promise!)

The other thing keeping me up at unusual hours is that Blind Side has been on promo.  I’ve been trying to get the word out and do my bit to encourage sales (started experimenting with FB and BookBub ads, apart from the usual social media things). They seemed to help get things moving, certainly.

I got quite excited at the end of last week when the US and UK Amazon rankings started to improve dramatically, then on Sunday the Book Gorilla email came out with my book in the top slot. Cue some late-night computer screen watching. I guess all will go back to normal soon, but in the meantime I’ve grabbed a couple screen shots as evidence:

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The book did climb somewhat higher than this but I was too preoccupied to get a screen shot by then. Good to see the US Amazon rank improve too (from languishing around 1.5 million a week ago!)

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Oh yes, and this morning I saw a familiar cover up on the ebook deals page of Lounge Books:

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The price drop should go on for a few days longer (from £2.99p to 99p/99c/AUS1.99/Cdn$1.99).

Tomorrow I’m off to The Harpenden Arms to be part of a panel with fellow Unbound authors Kerensa Jennings and Ian Ridley, hosted by Katherine Sunderland. If anyone happens to be close enough, do come on over. Tickets at door or from Eventbrite. £10 or £5.

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Garden Palace: Turning historical mystery into urban fantasy via @PatriciaLeslieA

Today’s guest author, Patricia Leslie, was inspired by an unsolved real-life mystery – the origin of the huge fire which destroyed an impressive and important building in 19th century Sydney, Australia. Here’s the intriguing story of how Ms Leslie’s second novel Keeper of the Way (Crossing The Line, book one) came into being. It’s due to be released on 24 February.

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I have always been fascinated by hidden history – the side of stories we don’t learn about at school. The people who are written out of history because they weren’t on the “side” in power. Past cultures that form the basis of later ones but appear to have been “forgotten”.

My first novel The Ouroboros Key came from madly devouring everything I could find on early Christian history and the sometimes wild links between human cultures and intergalactic cultures. Give me a whiff of the purposely hidden and conspiracy, and my imagination is off and running.

In 2015 I read a news story about Sydney’s Garden Palace and its fiery demise, and I was hooked. For a start, I’ve been a Sydney-sider for fifty-plus years but I’d never heard of this building. Intrigued after finding out that they still don’t know how the fire started, I set about a little digging.

[image error]In 1879, Sydney gained an international exhibition building known as the Garden Palace. The building, located in the Royal Botanical Gardens beside the Governor’s stables (now the Conservatorium of Music) was nothing less than extraordinary. It was massive! A beautiful stained-glass and copper dome was designed and built to allow daylight to shine on the head of Queen Victoria, who stood perpetually observing the goings on in the nave and galleries. Under her feet was a magnificent fountain. Packed to the rafters with art and museum collections from around Australia and the world, over one million people passed through its doors, sampled the local and international fare at the many café pavilions and tapped their feet at regular concerts and performances. Culture had come to the colony!

How could I not have known about this?

[image error]Postcard from the Sydney Exhibition

Then on September 22nd 1882 the Garden Palace burned to the ground. Everything inside was lost and the cause of the fire a complete mystery. The nightwatchmen on patrol in the wee hours had completed their tour of the building when they realised that the ornate fountain was engulfed in smoke. Queen Victoria and her antipodean palace were doomed to a fiery death. In the following days, newspapers reported a mysterious figure seen jumping from a first-floor balcony. Could this have been the arsonist? This figure disappeared like smoke into the gardens and wasn’t seen again.

 

In those days, Macquarie Street was lined with Georgian sandstone mansions. The Garden Palace had blocked their views of Sydney Harbour. Could it have been an irate neighbour with a fire fetish? Also, the government officers were reported to hold a lot of valuable information on who was who, who they were before, and what they were up to in the colonies. Did someone have a secret to hide at all costs?

It’s been 135 years and we still don’t know – we probably never will. But what, I wondered, if it was something more shadowy than espionage? Less devious than a disgruntled fire-bug? Further research into the social history of the period led me to the rich history of my ancestral roots (Scotland and Ireland) and the entirely plausible possibility that ancient traditions would be easily brought from one country to another. Emigration from Scotland and Ireland was high in the mid-1800s and many of those people came to Australia. It’s a natural presumption they would keep their stories and cultural practices. We can see evidence of this today in the cultural enclaves surrounding our cities.

I started threading in stories of canny folk, the demonisation of wise women, and the necessary custom of women’s history staying under the radar, hidden from those who would rob and destroy in a quest for power. With Queen Victoria as a covert symbol of female power, the stories and voices of Victorian-age women and traditional women’s magic, I wove a story that journeys from a ruin on the Isle of Skye to bustling cosmopolitan Sydney of the 1880s and beyond. I wrapped a mystery in mystery and came up with Keeper of the Way.

We cross many lines throughout our lifetime: my characters crossed the line that is the equator, the line between traditional gender roles, acceptable and non-acceptable behaviour, old traditions and modern religion. Keeper of the Way is the first of the Crossing The Line series, due out 24 February 2018. It blends magic, myth and monsters with history (my favourite subjects), reality with the supernatural, and the normal with the paranormal.

 

Author links

Website: www.patricialeslie.net

Instagram: @patricialeslee

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/patricialeslieauthor

Twitter: @PatriciaLeslieA

Book links

Buy KEEPER OF THE WAY from Odyssey Books

Review of Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land #bookreview

 

Good Me, Bad Me by debut author Ali Land has had such a lot of attention since it was published last year that I couldn’t resist checking it out. I’m totally glad I did as I was riveted from the start. This is the most powerful, cleverly written book I’ve read in a while – and it’s oh so dark. And the ending!!!

Here’s the blurb:

[image error]Good Me Bad Me is dark, compelling, voice-driven psychological suspense by debut author Ali Land.

How far does the apple really fall from the tree?

Milly’s mother is a serial killer. Though Milly loves her mother, the only way to make her stop is to turn her in to the police. Milly is given a fresh start: a new identity, a home with an affluent foster family, and a spot at an exclusive private school.

But Milly has secrets, and life at her new home becomes complicated. As her mother’s trial looms, with Milly as the star witness, Milly starts to wonder how much of her is nature, how much of her is nurture, and whether she is doomed to turn out like her mother after all.

When tensions rise and Milly feels trapped by her shiny new life, she has to decide: Will she be good? Or is she bad? She is, after all, her mother’s daughter.

The premise is startling – the daughter of a serial killer has turned in her mother to the police. Now, while she prepares to give evidence against her mother in court, 15-year-old Annie-turned-Milly is living with a foster family under a new identity to protect her from retribution by parents of the mother’s ten or so victims (all boys), along with presumably her mother and anyone else. Milly’s foster father, the well-intentioned psychologist Mike, makes a habit of rescuing children and is valiantly trying to hold his unappreciative family together: his fragile, unsuited-to-motherhood wife Saskia and their vindictive, insecure daughter Phoebe who develops an instant hatred of Milly and starts bullying her at school.

All this certainly didn’t seem a very likely scenario, as there’s not many female serial killers in real life for a start, and for worker in a women’s refuge to get away with killing so many children of the women staying there implies that the police must be pretty inept. Also it did seem odd that Mike could actually have counselling sessions with Milly in his house while being her foster father – surely that would be a conflict of interest? There are credible details of court procedures and social workers though, and enough ‘realism’ to make me go along with the situation.

But no matter how audacious the plot, I found myself totally immersed. The story feels absolutely authentic in a psychological sense. The novel’s narrator, Annie/Milly is utterly convincing as a teenager haunted by both the choices she made in a house of horrors and by her mother, whose presence constantly returns. Much of Milly writes is addressed to a ‘You’, her absent mother. The times when her hideously transformed mother comes to ‘visit’ Milly are chilling, along with Milly’s memories of what happened in the house. (She was living alone with her mother when the boys were murdered and disposed of inside the house, all of whom were children of women from the refuge where Milly’s mother worked.)

Mercifully, Ms Land does not go into much explicit detail concerning the torture and murder of the boys, beyond occasional references (e.g. ‘the playground’; ‘little somethings’). The restraint is effective, as is the gradual revealing of what most troubles and nags at Annie/Milly. She asks herself, can I ever overcome the influence of my mother – and which version of me will triumph, the good me or the bad me?

Very cleverly, the author kept me in suspense and constantly changing my mind over which path she would take. As Milly befriends Morgan, another neglected girl from a council estate, whose poverty contrasts  with the foster family’s middleclass privilege, the full meaning of the ‘good me’ and the ‘bad me’ begins to become concrete, ramping up the tension.

There are fascinating ideas at the heart of Good Me, Bad Me. How likely is the child of psychopath likely to have similar tendencies, whether through genes or upbringing? Can such a child ever hope to be ‘normal’? Is there ever a real choice to be made between the paths of good and evil, or this something predestined or beyond choice?

The voice of Milly grabbed me the most about this novel, though. In simple, often fractured prose, it stunningly conveys the complexity of a girl who cannot escape the relationship with her mother – her desperate need to belong and be loved, her loyalty yet ambivalence towards her mother, her guilt through being made complicit in her mother’s terrible crimes. I could relate to Milly as she tried to do the right thing, while fending off the memories of being brought up by an abusive, self-absorbed mother. And then I felt the rug being pulled away…

Milly is an unreliable narrator par excellence, withholding information and her real emotions from both her foster father/counsellor, the art teacher who encourages her, the girl she befriends, the cruel Phoebe and just about everyone around her – as well as the reader, we come to realise as Milly dispenses just enough of the truth to tease and mislead.

Highly recommended for lovers of ultra-dark psychological novels. It’s the second ‘evil mother novel’ I’ve read recently (the other being the wonderful Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine), and of the two Good Me, Bad Me definitely wins the most chilling mother award.

Blind Side now on Kindle Unlimited

Yes, my book is now available to read for free if you’re in Amazon’s KU plan (ebook only). The normal Kindle price is £2.99. Here’s the link:

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#Guest Post by Maggie Ritchie: Researching historical novels set in Paris and Africa @MallonRitchie

Today I welcome award-winning author and journalist Maggie Ritchie to my blog. Ms Ritchie reveals what she did to research her two novels, from checking out galleries and pavement cafes in Paris – hard work indeed! – to studying witch doctors. 

Research is one of the great joys of writing an historical novel. When I wrote my first novel, Paris Kiss, my research often took me out of the library to recreate the colourful and bohemian world of the Belle Epoque.

[image error]Seurat La Grande Jatte

I needed to find out what life was like in the late 19th century for my two artist heroines, Camille Claudel and Jessie Lipscomb, who were both protégées of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin. As well as poring over history books, biographies, fashion plates and memoirs, I visited a stone sculptor’s studio to experience the cold, dusty, noisy reality of stone sculpting. I also spent a great deal of time looking closely

at paintings and sculptures. My imagination was fired by the work of Claudel, Lipscomb and Rodin, and also by that of their contemporaries, who captured the everyday lives of Parisians. Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herb, Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, and Toulous-Lautrec’s paintings of louche and despairing dancers, singers and prostitutes all inspired scenes in my novel.

 

[image error]Renoir Dance at Bougival

Renoir Dance at BougivalOf course, visits to Paris were an essential part of my research – and not exactly an ordeal. I walked the same streets as Camille and Jessie, sat in pavement cafés in Montmartre and Montparnasse, and visited Rodin’s home. It’s now the Rodin Museum displaying not only his works but also those of his lover and muse, Camille Claudel.

 

The sculptures by Rodin and Claudel gave me fascinating insights into their world and their creative process. As well as looking at their works in the Rodin Museum, I made use of The Burrell Collection and the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow (where I live), all of which have pieces by the great man, including The Thinker and his bust of Camille Claudel.

[image error]It was Rodin’s The Kiss which inspired the novel’s title and spoke of the passionate affair between its creator and Claudel. The sculpture came on tour to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh and it brought me luck – the day I went to see it was the day I learned that Paris Kiss would be published by Saraband.[image error]

My second novel, Looking for Evelyn, was more contemporary and I thought it would need less research, as it was set in 1970s Zambia, where I spent a big chunk of my childhood. However, I soon discovered that while the sights, sounds, smells and vivid colours of Africa came back to me in great sensory waves, I needed to find out about the grown-up world of politics and race that had gone over my head as a child.

The library beckoned once more – Glasgow University Library is a fantastic resource and well worth the annual fee – as well as a trawl through Abe books for the memoirs, novels and studies of people who, like my father, had lived and worked in Southern Africa when African countries were shaking off their colonial masters.

I read the memoir of a colonial officer who travelled through the Federation of Northern of Rhodesia and Nyasaland – now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi – and studied the tribal customs. They gave me an insight into the traditional beliefs in witches, witch doctors, curses and charms – which became part of my story about a journalist who returns to Zambia to uncover a scandal she witnessed as a child involving an English woman, her colonial officer husband and a gifted black African artist.

[image error]Because Looking for Evelyn is set in the recent past, I was able to do ‘live’ research – interviewing people who had lived in Zambia during the 1970s.  I recorded the memories of my parents and discovered fascinating aspects of their lives I would never have otherwise known. I had grown up with some of the more colourful family anecdotes: the teacher training college and brand-new language laboratory that my dad had spearheaded that was burnt to the ground one night; the near-death brushes with poisonous snakes; the flying ants my mum fried for us one supper-time; the college messenger who doubled as the village witchdoctor. But I also discovered why a teacher training college was so necessary and how it was part of a larger plan by the outgoing British administration to train the local population that had been denied anything other than the most basic primary school education.

An interview with a friend’s mother, who had run the Lusaka Club with her husband in the 1970s, gave me the idea for the scandal that rocked the British community in my novel, as well as an insight into how hard it was for white women and mothers in what was considered a tough posting in an undeveloped country suffering from shortages and rife with disease and danger.

I also interviewed a retired missionary priest, a White Father, who had gone out to the Federation in the 1950s as a young man from Ireland and had stayed until the Aids epidemic in the 1980s. His compassionate insights, funny stories and regrets about the British experience in Southern Africa added layers to the novel and deepened my own understanding of the country I had loved so much as a child. Like my heroine, I enjoyed revisiting it, even if through my imagination.

I’ve found that research is an essential part of writing and adds the rich details and truths that make an imaginary world real to the reader. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to reading forgotten memoirs and looking at paintings for my latest novel, set in turn-of-the-century Glasgow and 1920s Shanghai.

Author bio

[image error]Maggie Ritchie is an award-winning author and a journalist. Born in India, she grew up in Zambia, Spain and Venezuela before settling in Scotland, where she lives with her husband and son.

Maggie graduated with distinction from the University of Glasgow’s MLitt in Creative Writing, where she won the Curtis Brown Prize 2012 and was runner up for the Sceptre Prize. Her debut novel, Paris Kiss, was longlisted in the Mslexia First Novel Competition in 2014.
She has had short stories published in magazines and in New Writing Scotland.

Book and author info

Author website: maggieritchie.com

Author Facebook

Twitter: @MallonRitchie

Paris Kiss Amazon UK

Looking for Evelyn Amazon UK

 

News and Plans for 2018

This post is a little later than I intended owing to being away over Christmas, domestic interruptions (fridge delivery, Virgin cutting off our internet), other things needing attention (tax return) and time-management issues.

Writing news

[image error]In 2017 I started submitting short stories to competitions and devoted regular mornings to writing (and editing) them. Earlier this week I was encouraged to find that my story “The Gift”, about young girls trafficked from overseas, made the Top 40 for the Words And Women national prose competition.

I’ve also sent off my story “The Last Trip” to a few competitions. Inspired by a visit to Canada last year, it is about a couple with terminal conditions who encounter a grizzly while seeing the world together one last time. I’m still working on a more lighthearted story about a married woman who becomes infatuated with a famous author with an uncanny resemblance to a certain Norwegian literary sensation. This is threatening to become a novella, despite trying to keep it short. (Flash version on Sebnem Saunders’ blog.)

One thing I love about writing ‘short’ stories and flash fiction is how they can be perfected – or at least redrafted in days rather than months. They are good practice for learning what is and isn’t essential in a manuscript, and a great way to experiment with different genres and writing styles.

Blind Side news

There’s now over 100 reviews on Amazon UK and Amazon.com combined (109 at time of writing) {feeling faint emoji} plus a fair few lurking on other Amazon sites, Netgalley, Goodreads and other places. THANK YOU everyone reading this who has left a review anywhere for my book, whether you’re a dedicated blogger/reviewer or a ‘normal’ reader! That sounds wrong but you know what I mean

The Christmas Spirit

Around this time of year, in this small, damp, dark corner of Europe (just about), the ‘Christmas spirit’ is well and truly in the air. We (Britain/England/United Kingdom) are still a Christian country at heart, dare I say. One can’t go out without a backdrop of Christmas carols and everywhere there seem to be Christian messages about peace, goodwill and our obligations to look out for each other at this time of year. But it can all feel a bit hollow, a capitalist festival hoisted onto a captive audience of consumers.

Like many, despite having no belief in God, I seem unable to resist the traditions of buying and wrapping presents, putting up decorations, sending cards and so forth. Whether it’s from social conditioning or a stubborn attachment to that annual magical glow in childhood, and I feel I ought to at least make an effort to join in with it all.

As some may know, I’m a keen singer. This year, I joined a second choir (singing is wonderfully mood lifting). For weeks we’ve been practising carols, traditional Christmas songs and religious-themed music for December concerts. The incongruity of an atheist singing praises to the Lord has struck me occasionally. But much religious music is beautiful, so I’m happy to sing it. Many of the older carols and songs of Christmas have a strong connection to past times. Wassailing, figgy pudding, etc etc – it’s all so gloriously English.

From the website Hymns and Carols of Christmas: “The tradition of wassailers going door to door, singing and drinking to the health of those whom they visit, goes back to pre-Christian fertility rites where the villagers went through orchards at mid-winter singing and shouting loudly to drive out evil spirits, and pouring cider on the roots of trees to encourage fertility.”

I’m sorely tempted to rummage around this site for hours, but will resist in the interests of getting my tax return done (aaargh) and Christmas shopping (enjoyable in theory but tinged with anxiety now it’s only 4 days before The Day).

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Back to religious music – one of the highlights of the chamber choir concert I sang in last week was the choral piece Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light). It was written in 1997 by the American composer Morten Lauridsen.

This is by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever sung (it’s in Latin, the alto part spans two octaves and the Alleluias are a nightmare). A 28-minute You Tube video of the complete work, performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia, has beautiful images of stars, planets and galaxies set to the music. The contrasting parts of Lux Aeterna suggest light and dark, death and creation. Fitting to watch today, perhaps, given it’s the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.

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I’ve listened to the piece several times to get an idea of how it should sound. From finding it opaque and somewhat weird at first, I began to actually appreciate the music. The last time I felt a strange stirring of the spirit, as if the music was somehow bringing me in touch with the mystery of life, the universe and our part in it. Judging from the comments made below the video, I’m not alone in finding the music uplifting. Someone has commented: “This is what heaven sounds like.  This is how angels sing”.

As this is likely to be my last post of the year (Mr E and I are off to our mountain hideaway), I’ll wish you all a happy solstice and a peaceful, joy-filled Christmas/midwinter break/year-end bacchanal – and a splendid 2018!

#guestpost by Clare Harvey: Rediscovering war artist Dame Laura Knight via @clareharveyauth

Historical fiction author Clare Harvey guests on my blog today. She discusses how she incorporated both reality and her imagination when creating a ‘real-life’ character in her latest book, The Night Raid (renowned artist Dame Laura Knight). Let’s hope Ms Harvey doesn’t hear from any disgruntled readers this time!

[image error]It was a slap in the face. After dozens of four and five star Amazon reviews for my second novel, The English Agent (Simon & Schuster, 2016), I got my first ever one-star review: “I feel this is a very poor book and the Vera Atkins portrayed in it is nothing like the real Vera Atkins. It does an immense disservice to a great lady. In my opinion it was bordering on libellous, although I realise that you cannot libel the dead,” said the reader.

Oh dear. It had never been my intention to cause upset with my fictional take on the Secret Operations Executive (SOE) agent handler Vera Atkins, one of the main characters in The English Agent. However, the one-star review set me thinking about the borders between truth and imagination when using real-life figures as a stepping off point for historical fiction.

In the course of my research for The English Agent I’d read Sara Helm’s comprehensive biography: A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Abacus, 2006), watched old TV interviews with the SOE officer, visited her wartime London home, and listened to audio archive of her held by the Imperial War Museum. I knew I had taken care to ensure my made-up version of her was authentic. But, as a result of that one-star Amazon review, I felt that I should re-double my efforts in future work, and try to create characters that contain as much ‘truth’ within them as possible.

[image error]In my new book, The Night Raid (Simon & Schuster, 2017), one of the central characters is Dame Laura Knight, a renowned painter who worked as a war artist in both First and Second World Wars. I made sure I discovered as much as possible about Dame Laura before beginning. I’d already seen many of her paintings in a 2013 exhibition of her work in her hometown of Nottingham, and I then read everything I could lay my hands on, scouting round for her rare, out-of-print autobiographies: Oil Paint & Grease Paint (Penguin, 1941*), and The Magic of a Line (Kimber, 1965), which were wonderful reading, because her voice comes through so clearly in the narrative. There were also two biographies of the artist: Janet Dunbar’s Laura Knight (Harper Collins, 1975) – now also out of print – and Laura Knight: A life by Barbara C Morden (McNidder & Grace, 2013). As well as reading about her, I visited Laura’s childhood home in Nottingham, her wartime home in the Malvern Hills and watched old Pathe newsreels documenting the unveiling of her most famous piece of war art, a portrait of a girl in an ordnance factory: Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring.

Having discovered a wealth of information about the world-famous artist, I then created a slice of her life that never actually happened. In The Night Raid Laura returns to her home town of Nottingham to paint the girls at the gun factory, and in the process discovers secrets about her own past and the lives of the young women whose portraits she’s working on. It was a joy to write, and I think my genuine passion – bordering on obsession – for my subject comes through in the narrative.

As Hilary Mantel says: “I am not a historian. I don’t see what I do as being rival to biography.” I agree with her, but I like to think of writing historical fiction as a bit like building a wall. The historical and biographical facts are the bricks and your imagination is the mortar – the wall is a fiction entirely of the author’s creation, but it contains truths that are an integral part of the structure, and without which it would come crumbling down. I hope I’m right – and that there are no one-star reviews this time!

You can catch up with Clare Harvey on her author Facebook page (ClareHarvey13), Twitter (@ClareHarveyauth), website: http://clareharvey.net, or via her publisher’s author page: http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/authors/Clare-Harvey/576635850

* ‘Oil Paint & Grease paint’ is due to be re-released in hardback by Unicorn books in 2018

Book info

The Night Raid (Simon & Schuster) is out now in hardback and e-book, and the paperback is published on 14th December 2017.

Buy on UK Amazon

Author bio

Acclaimed author Clare Harvey spent a childhood in Mauritius, Surrey and Devon. She studied Law at the University of Leicester, and has had an itinerant adulthood, travelling throughout sub-saharan Africa and working as a freelance journalist and English tutor in Nepal, Germany and Northern Ireland, as well as various parts of England. She has three children and has now settled with her family in Nottingham.