Isobel Blackthorn's Blog, page 5

The Cabin Sessions: 0.99 US/UK Kindle 11/3 through 11/9

The Cabin Sessions will be available for 0.99 as a Kindle purchase in US/UK from November 3 through November 9. You can purchase from Amazon here. You can find out more about this book below.

***** “I was gripped in horrified fascination by Blackthorn’s subtle story.” – Zoe, Audible

***** “The author creates a story and unfold it bit by bit while painting a picture that comes alive as you watch. This type of writing is so much more precise and artistic than many of today’s author’s who put out garbage that somehow becomes best sellers.” – Paul Estrada

***** “Enticing and intriguing and entertaining.” – Eddie Generous 

About The Cabin Sessions

The Cabin Sessions brims with psychology and atmosphere.

A storm is rolling into the narrow mountain pass when hapless musician Adam Banks stands on the bridge over the river that cleaves the remote village of Burton. The night is already blighted by an astrological omen, and Adam thinks of turning back. Instead, struggling against rising panic, he resolves to fulfill his obligation to perform the guest spot at The Cabin Sessions. He cannot let down his mentor, Benny Muir.

But bad news awaits him. And at least one fellow musician he would rather not meet.

Told from third person viewpoints of Adam and Philip, the town’s plumber, the evening is mapped out in slow eerie detail – that at once manages to evoke Burton’s fanatical cult history while also acting as a harbinger of the disaster to come. In between these two male viewpoints, is the delicate first-person voice of Eva, the breath holder, whose recollections shed an unsettling light on the characters in The Cabin.

Read an Excerpt here

The Legacy of Old Gran Parks: .99 Kindle 10/28 through 11/01

The Legacy of Old Gran Parks will be available for .99 as a Kindle purchase from October 28 through November 01. You can purchase from Amazon here. You can find out more about this book below.

***** “Just buy it. It’s brilliant.”

***** “Blackthorn’s writing style flows like a river in a barren land. Unobstructed. Understated. Unequalled.”

***** ” If you are a fan of Tarantino movies, you are more than likely going to enjoy this”

About The Legacy of Old Gran Parks

Southern Australia, 1983. While Middle-aged stalwart Miriam rolls into town in her broken down car, Frankie – a deer hunter – is up in the forested hinterland with her gun.

Meanwhile, fisherwoman Old Pearl sits on her front deck with her dog, a glass of whiskey in her hand, and Emily, the English backpacker, scrubs out the pie-encrusted kitchen at the roadhouse.

But all is not well.

Gran Parks is stirring.

Four troubled women. One restless spirit.

Who will survive?

The Legacy of Old Gran Parks

Read an excerpt here. https://www.nextchapter.pub/books/the-legacy-of-old-gran-parks

New Release set in Canary Islands – Sing Like a Canary

I’m thrilled to announce the release of Sing Like a Canary (Canary Islands Mysteries Book 5)

This book is very special as it is loosely based on experiences my mum had during her time in a police crime squad that nailed a notorious London gang in the 1970s.

Here’s the blurb:

Retired police officer Marjorie Pierce is on her way to Lanzarote to track down her old informer, Billy McKenzie. Billy ended Marjorie’s career, and she needs an explanation; an apology.

Present and past soon collide when gangsters Eric and Mick Maloney turn up on the island with revenge in their veins, and Marjorie has to race against the clock to get to Billy before the brothers.

But who is complicit and who can be trusted… and who really betrayed Marjorie all those years ago?

A multi-layered mystery packed with suspense, Sing Like A Canary is the fifth book in Isobel Blackthorn’s Canary Islands Mysteries Series, and can be enjoyed as a standalone even if you haven’t read other books in the series.

Here’s a taste:

You can find details of the other books in this award-winning series here https://isobelblackthorn.com/canary-islands-novels/

On La Palma, the Cumbre Viejo Volcanic Eruption and Bananas

I’ve been following the volcanic eruption on La Palma from the get go, having already heard about the earthquakes they were having. I’ve been on Google Maps exploring the area now under the lava. I’ve read articles mostly from Spanish news sites and seen the footage posted on Twitter and YouTube. Footage of lava racing down flanks of the Cumbre Vieja ridge. Footage of houses being consumed by a wall of lava as it pushes onwards on its inexorable journey to the sea. Fat tongues of lava fanning out, crushing and burying banana plantations and vineyards. Roads and infrastructure, gone. Schools, churches, everything gone. Whole villages gone. And new land being created on the coast.

As the author of many novels set on the islands, I felt I had to write something about this at once magnificent and catastrophic event, but it’s been hard to come up with anything fresh considering the widespread news coverage. So I thought I would write a little about what matters most to me and possibly to the citizens of La Palma: bananas.

I’ve never been to La Palma, but the Canary Islands are connected to each and to have lived on one – Lanzarote in my case – is to have an awareness of them all. And as a writer, I have researched what it is like to experience major volcanic events. Not only the lava, but the explosions sending spumes of ash skyward to fall like rain far and wide, the constant roar, the toxic gases. The fear and fascination, and then the loss of livelihoods and most if not all possessions.

What impressed me when I was researching and what impresses me now is the tenacity of the Canary Islands’ people. The way that since first arrival they have clung on in these inhospitable if dramatically beautiful places and found ways to exist. Five of the islands – Gran Canaria, Tenerife, La Gomera, El Hierro and La Palma – are the tips of enormous volcanoes poking out above the sea. Beaches are few, flat land scarce, and towering cliffs and ravines many. Although the climate, by anyone’s standards, is near perfection.

Before modern development, if you were to live on the islands, you would have needed to fish and farm. Farming meant taking advantage of what little rain was to be had, especially on Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. It meant finding where the soil was good and the aspect right, often terracing the steep slopes. It meant cultivating land right to the edge of precipitous cliffs and ravines. No one with a fear of heights (like me) would have coped. The ingenuity of Canary Island farmers is impressive. As is their tenacity.

Taken from Google Maps. Highest elevation 2,423 metres

On La Palma, when locals realised about seventy years ago that the west coast offered the perfect climate conditions for growing bananas, they trucked in top soil, set up extensive irrigation systems and started planting. At some point, tunnels were blasted through the little island’s mountainous centre to connect east and west, making it easier to transport the crop to the port. All along the little bit of cultivatable land right beside the sea, banana plantations sit cheek by jowl. Bananas form a vital part of the La Palma economy. About 60,000 bananas are exported each year and the industry is run as an agricultural collective overseeing every aspect from growing and harvesting to packing and shipping.

The more the lava of this current eruption fans out, the greater the damage to these plantations. There is so little suitable land along the west coast that there may be no starting over for those plantation owners who have lost everything. This is what has struck me the most and why I feel deeply for the people caught up in this.

Farmers collect bananas from their farms full of ash from the erupting volcano on La Palma ANDRÉS GUTIÉRREZ (eldia.es)

I wonder if the tourists now flocking to watch this eruption care much about the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Or if they are just there for the fascination. Maybe even peeling a banana!

Some Alice Bailey Genealogy used for her Biography

I was going through a pile of old papers this morning and came across some documents I thought worth sharing. These documents concern theosophist Alice A. Bailey, born Alice Ann La Trobe-Bateman (1880-1949).

Alice Bailey at Ascona 1932. Photo courtesy Rose Bates (www.alicebaileyarchives.com), edited and colourised by Steven Chernikeeff

Researching Alice Bailey’s genealogy proved straightforward when it came to her father’s line as the aristocratic La Trobe-Bateman family were high-achieving with a number of notable figures including first lieutenant-governor of Victoria, Australia, Charles La Trobe, and renowned water engineer John Frederic La Trobe-Bateman.

When it came to Alice Bailey’s mother’s line, things were more challenging, but a subscription to Ancestry helped. I ordered Alice Bailey’s birth certificate and her mother’s birth and marriage certificates from the General Register Office, London, UK, just to make absolutely certain that my research was accurate.

I also ordered Alice Bailey’s parent’s marriage certificate.

With this information, I started searching through the Census records. And I came up with a sketch of Alice Bailey’s mother’s family. They belonged to the respectable middle class. I thought I would share my rough sketch in the raw with all of the crossings out and a few thoughts. It’s messy, but that’s research. I used this to inform the first chapter in Alice A. Bailey: Life and Legacy.

I pored over all these documents, as I did all the research material I used to compose the biography. For me, it was a once in a lifetime undertaking and I am very pleased I took the trouble to do it. If Alice Bailey is of interest to you, I hope you are drawn in by these documents as I was.

Alice Bailey biographical novel wins book award!

I’m thrilled to announce that The Unlikely Occultist has won the Honorable Mention Award in the Realistic Fiction category of the 2021 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards. Reviewed By Deborah Lloyd for Readers’ Favorite:

Shortly after her loving Aunt Hilary’s funeral, Heather faced a challenge at her job. At the State Library in Victoria, Australia, she was assigned the task of assessing a one-hundred box collection donated by the late Professor Foyle. She was a professor of religious studies, with a strong interest in Alternative Spiritualities, often called New Age. Heather soon became engrossed in the professor’s writings, and how her own belief system was affected by the study of this collection is a fascinating aspect of this book. Author Isobel Blackthorn has crafted a thought-provoking, insightful book in The Unlikely Occultist: A Biographical Novel of Alice A. Bailey. The journey of Alice is told in a chronological format, including both her personal life and her work in the spiritual realm.

This biographical novel is written in an easy-to-read, flowing manner. It describes the facts of Alice Bailey’s life – the early years of strong Christian beliefs; her commitment to service; the expansion of her spiritual beliefs; the telepathic connection with several Masters; her marriages and mothering three daughters. It also includes how some spiritualists accepted and others vilified her prolific writings and presentations. How Isobel Blackthorn interweaves the life of Alice of the last century and the life of Heather at the present time is truly masterful. This book provides a context for anyone interested in Alice’s teachings and books, the Arcane School, or organizations she or her followers founded. A novel based on historical facts, The Unlikely Occultist is truly an exceptional read.

You can read more about this novel on my website or read an extract here https://www.nextchapter.pub/books/unlikely-occultist-story-of-alice-bailey

A Prison in the Sun Finalist-Winner in the 2021 International Book Awards

Book 3 of my Canary Islands Mysteries Series Wins Finalist Award in the 2021 International Book Awards

I’m thrilled to announce this latest award for A Prison in the Sun! The novel has already won the Finalist Award in the 2020 Readers’ Favorite Awards. I guess that means it’s a multi-award winner!

I wrote A Prison in the Sun to introduce the English-speaking world to a little-known atrocity that occurred in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, Spain – a small farm prison on a former military base used to incarcerate gay men in the 1950s and 60s using a tweak to the vagrancy act. There were other prisons used for the same purpose dotted throughout Spain. My understanding is the one in Fuerteventura was about the worst.

The ‘hostel’ as it was known, comprised three small concrete-block huts each housing about twelve men in the most appalling conditions. (The prison itself pre-dates the incarceration of gay men and included criminals and political prisoners used as slave labour, almost chain-gang style, in farm work and road building in blistering desert conditions.) The prison and the treatment of the gay men who were sent there for ‘reconditioning’ was a travesty.

Even today, after the true and horrible story broke in the Canary Islands and mainland Spain around ten years ago, few know about this prison camp, which is likened to a concentration camp. There is a memorial, but it is situated inside the compound of what is now a youth hostel, tucked out of view of anyone who happens by, which would not be many since the place is not signposted and the area is remote. It remains the island’s dark secret.

I am a strong believer in using fiction to raise awareness. I have known about the prison since 1988 when I was living in Lanzarote and my local friends told me about it. One even drove by it and pointed it out to me.

Fast forward to 2017 and the prison came to light again when I came close to buying a farmhouse nearby in one of my attempts at relocation. That was when I decided I had to incorporate the truth into a novel. It was no easy thing. All the information about the prison was in Spanish and all the historical background was as well. I read countless articles and blog posts, along with a couple of PhD’s, a novella and an academic book, all in a language I have a modest grasp of. The novella was the hardest to translate but I gave it my best effort.

I’m over the moon that all that effort has been appreciated by the judges of these awards.

You can find out more about A Prison in the Sun here – Award-Winning Finalist in the Fiction: LGBTQ category of the 2021 International Book Awards

Borders Open Borders Shut: When Will I Ever Get Back to the Canary Islands?

Canary Islands, all I can do is give you a wave from afar!

I live in Victoria, Australia. Covid 19 cases are few but we don’t want any. We take a very hard line. Australia has become a gilded cage and there’s no sign of the cage opening any time soon. Hopes for travel by Christmas 2022 could be pie in the sky. We’re very lucky and the envy of the world, but the restrictions only serve to make my wanderlust more intense. I don’t do prisons. But what to do? Life goes on. You just have to make the best of things. And I’ve had my first dose of the AstraZeneca shot which puts me a small step closer to my travel goal.

I’m sitting here at my brand new desk enjoying the comforts of my brand new office chair. I bought it last month in Canary yellow! Could be the start of some very sunny home decor. And of course I write at this desk every day and I’m back in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote in my mind.

A field of maize in Maguez, Lanzarote, taken by me.

When I lived in Lanzarote, the old road north to Arrieta went through Guatiza and Mala. There were sealed roads but hardly ever any traffic. The north was remote and empty. The further north you went, the emptier it got. When I went back in 2016, I was awash with the same feelings I felt back in the 1980s, only this time the island was busy end to end and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing someone. I would have enjoyed being there during Covid as it would have been for me a reprieve from all that bustle. Selfish, I know.

I like to imagine what the islands were like before the tourist invasion. We live in a much more homogenous world today and it’s a huge stretch of the imagination to conjure a life of simple farming in this brutal if stunning landscape. And what of all the other jobs people did? There would have been fishermen and doctors and teachers and priests. Tailors and shop keepers and those working in the mills. Writers and journalists. Police and a judge. And a wealthy tier of Spanish landowners. What would a day-to-day life have felt like? What would we all be thinking about? What are the stories locked away in the stones of the old houses? What of the old people there now, people born in the 1930s and 1940s, what do they recall of their parents and grandparents? I have a hunger to know. I can only hope someone is making an effort to capture some of those stories before they are lost forever.

Back in the early 1880s, travel writer Olivia Stone wrote of Guatiza:

The village is situated on a flat plain between hills…It was here we saw for the first time extraordinary cone-shaped stacks, twelve to twenty feet in height, in the hollow centre of which grain was stored. The top of which is removed each year to admit the grain, was here of red clay, which dries to a lighter colour, and looks like a monk’s shaven head…The road is a wide path between broad, low walls of grey pumice stones, and winds in and out and round the farms and farmhouses like a maze, for one frequently turns to the left in order to reach one’s destination on the right. Cochineal is the chief product, and everywhere the ugly cactus rises amid the dry, bare lava. The fields are simply composed of black cinders. What a burning, smothering furnace this place must be in summer, when even today the winter sun feels strong!

Olivia M. Stone Tenerife and its Six Satellites Vol II, pp 271-2.

I couldn’t find a photo of grain stacks on Lanzarote. The above image is taken from Stone’s book and depicts the grain stacks in La Oliva, Fuerteventura. (p 346)

Olivia Stone and her husband had many guides. Theirs were of the wealthier set. The Stones didn’t get down among the people. They observed from the elevated height of a camel back and were entertained by local dignitaries. That is not to detract from the valuable insights Olivia Stone has provided the English-speaking world into the Canary Islands of the late nineteenth century.

I was privileged back in February 2020 to have met with many friends who drove me all over the island of the Majoreros, including renowned Majorero artist and photographer JF Olivares. I suppose I got to feel a little bit like Olivia Stone because I, too, was visiting with a special purpose. To write about the islands.

Travelling from Lanzarote to Fuerteventura, I am always struck by the differences, the black cinders and the vast amount of lava on Lanzarote, and the majesty of the bare mountain ranges of Fuerteventura.

photo by JF Olivares

For me, this photo could just as well be a painting. Mountains beneath milky skies.

I’m so grateful to be able to include these images in my posts. Of course, no photo can replace being there. You can’t feel that uplift; the landscape can’t take your breath away. You can’t feel that wind!

The prevailing wind where I live comes off the cold Southern Ocean, sometimes all the way from Antarctica. It’s probably the cleanest air in the world. And when I head down to the coast and take in the heaving ocean, I am transported halfway around the world to my special place.

Maybe one day I’ll see you there. Keep well!

The Ash Museum by Rebecca Smith

I’m delighted to be a part of The Ash Museum Book Tour! About The Ash Museum

Through ten decades and across three continents, The Ash Museum is an intergenerational story of loss, migration and the search for somewhere to feel at home.

1944. The Battle of Kohima. James Ash dies leaving behind two families: his ‘wife’ Josmi and two children, Jay and Molly, and his parents and sister in England who know nothing about his Indian family.

2012. Emmie is raising her own daughter, Jasmine, in a world she wants to be very different from the racist England of her childhood. Her father, Jay, doesn’t even have a photograph of the mother he lost and still refuses to discuss his life in India. Emmie finds comfort in the local museum – a treasure trove of another family’s stories and artefacts.

Little does Emmie know that with each generation, her own story holds secrets and fascinations that she could only dream of.

My Thoughts

I was delighted to review The Ash Museum as part of this publisher book tour. Smith has penned an enthralling and elegantly written tale of intergenerational loss. The novel follows the current fashion for disjointed non-linear narratives, novels that make the reader work that little bit harder to follow the story. It takes skill to pull off this technique. Rebecca Smith has that skill.

While it may not have been the intention of the author to compose a YA novel, that is how it came across to me. Somehow, as I was reading I could picture myself in my old high school classroom, discussing the various interwoven threads of the tale. I wrote a detailed review for Trip Fiction. Here’s a taste:

Beautifully conceived and plainly told in a soft and gentle style, The Ash Museum tells the story of nine-year-old Emmie’s quest to discover what happened to her father and his birth parents in India. The opening chapters are set in the 1970s somewhere in Sussex, and depict the casual prejudices and embarrassing ignorance of the times with gentle irony as young Emmie’s father Jay Ash is roped into helping organise the local fête.

https://www.tripfiction.com/ya-novel-set-in-england-and-india/

Visit the Trip Fiction website to read my full review. (link in the quote above) With warm thanks to Legend Press for the opportunity to be a part of this tour.

From Australia to the Canary Islands – I’m Halfway Around the World from Where I Want To Be.

I’m sitting at my desk all rugged up on a cold and sunny day. I’m a British-Australian living down under, and if you drove a spike through the centre of the earth from my place you would just about end up in the Canary Islands. Which is where I want to be. And can’t be.

It’s a pretty weird feeling looking back a year or so to when I was last in Fuerteventura. That was when I looked around and decided that the Canary Islands were definitely where I wanted to live again, having lived in Lanzarote in the 1980s.

My last visit to Fuerteventura was February 2020. Brexit loomed large. Coronavirus was not yet a thing. With joy in my heart and a lot of fear, I hopped on the plane back to Oz in early March thinking I was about to sell my house, pack up my things and relocate in time to beat the Brexit deadline. I even gave a lawyer power of attorney so she could act on my behalf to buy a house.

Then, everything changed. Two weeks later, Australia became a fortress. Covid went viral. Even if I managed to beg my way out of the country, I couldn’t take the risk.

Which means I am now in the same position as tons of others who yearn to be where they cannot be, except that I am so so far away.

To bring myself closer, I am blogging. It’s a way of staying connected. Until, well, maybe one day…

I took this photo in that February of 2020. Just look at that incline! I was renting an apartment up that hill. I’d gone down to the port as I was looking at buying a flat nearby.

Puerto del Rosario

I was drawn to the area because one of the few locations that 19th century travel writer Olivia Stone stayed in is nearby. Back then, the building was a hotel. Now it’s a ruin.

Olivia Stone came on a tour of the Canary Islands with her husband in the 1880s. Her travel diary Tenerife and Its Six Satellites is well worth a read. I dip into it from time to time. It’s like entering an alternate universe. You know the places mentioned, you can feel the same heat, the wind, the sun on your face, but back then Fuerteventura was nothing at all like it is now.

These two volumes are a vital historical document. Olivia Stone documented the traditional ways of the islands. The section on Fuerteventura opens with a description of Corralejo as a collection of small fishermen’s huts. Here’s what she says about Puerto del Rosario, then Puerto Cabras:

Puerto Cabras is officially, but not really, the principal town of Fuerteventura. Several towns in the interior are larger and more important. It is, however, the only port, and hence its priority. The anchorage is not good, and the roadstead wide and open. The little village is built on the most hilly part of the shore, and so steep are its streets, that there is scarcely a house that not a view of the sea. The streets are very broad, grass-grown, and deserted; the houses are low, a few being two-storied, but are mostly in cottage style. They are neatly built. What vegetation there is being confined to the patios is consequently invisible, still further helping to give the dead appearance. A cannon-ball fired up a street would hurt no one.

Tenerife and its Six Satellites Vol II, p 354.

What a vivid image! It really makes you realise the changes that have taken place on the islands in the last 130 years or so. Olivia Stone’s Puerto Cabras is a far cry from the Puerto del Rosario I encountered last year.

I think the modern version is charming. Maybe I look through rose-coloured glasses but as I sit here trying to stay warm at my desk, another memory floats in. It’s of the woman standing behind me in the checkout queue in the Hiperdino supermarket on Calle Isla Graciosa in the last week of my stay. The way she broke out in conversation in Spanish assuming I could understand her, with my mind racing to assimilate her words and form replies. There we stood with her chatting and laughing and me floundering for the gist. I did well enough because she kept nudging my arm and chatting some more.

And I beamed inwardly all the way back to my flat.

How long it will be before Fortress Australia opens its borders and I can at least visit my favourite little islands is anyone’s guess. I can guarantee that all of you Brits will get there before me.

Keep safe. Go well!

follow this site to follow my blog