Julia Kelly's Blog, page 4
November 26, 2021
The Last Dance of the Debutante Canadian Release Party
Genevieve Graham Interviews Julia Kelly About The Last Dance of the Debutante
November 23, 2021
The Last Dance of the Debutant is in Canadian bookstores NOW!
I’m so excited that today kicks off the first of a series of exciting release days for my new historical novel The Last Dance of the Debutante!
Canadian readers, you can now find the paperback edition of this glittering look at the last days of English high society in your local independent bookstore or Chapters Indigo brand, as well as online at your favorite book retailer!
AMAZON CA | CHAPTERS INDIGOThe ebook is coming, so if you’re a digital reader, you can still preorder the ebook at your favorite digital retailer:
AMAZON CA | KOBO | APPLE BOOKS | GOOGLE PLAYUS and worldwide readers, don’t forget that The Last Dance of the Debutante is out for you in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook on January 4. You can still preorder the book at any of these places:
AMAZON US | BARNES & NOBLE | BOOKSHOP.ORG KOBO | APPLE BOOKS | GOOGLE PLAY AUDIBLE | LIBRO.FMAnd don’t forget, everyone can add The Last Dance of the Debutante to Goodreads!
Add to Goodreads
November 20, 2021
The Last Garden In England Readers Guide
A downloadble PDF version of The Last Garden in England readers guide is now available HERE.
Perfect for book clubs, the suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
You can view reading guides for more of Julia’s works HERE.
October 23, 2021
The Light Over London is on sale for $1.99 for a limited time!
I wanted to be sure to let you know about a rare sale for my first historical novel The Light Over London! This international bestselling book is now $1.99 for a very limited time.
AMAZON US | AMAZON CA | APPLE BOOKS | KOBO | GOOGLE PLAYI don’t know when this sale will come around again, so be sure to snap the ebook up while you can!
October 13, 2021
The Last Dance of the Debutante Is Getting a New Release Date!
I have a big update for those of you who are looking forward to my next historical novel The Last Dance of the Debutante.
You probably have heard of all of the supply chain and distribution issues that have been hitting various industries. Well, publishing hasn't escaped. My US publisher has made what I think is the right decision to push back the publication of The Last Dance of the Debutante to make sure that there's plenty of time to get books printed and into bookseller's hands so that you can buy them.
So what does this all mean?
The Last Dance of the Debutante will now be coming out January 4, 2022, in the US and worldwide except for Canada.
Canadian readers, you will be able to pick up print copies of The Last Dance of the Debutante from November 23rd. (No change there!) If you read ebooks, you will have to wait until January 4th.
I'm really sorry if anyone is disappointed by the pushed back release date, especially with holiday shopping coming. Trust me, if I thought that we could guarantee that books would end up in readers hands on December 7th as we'd planned, I know my publisher would be trying to make that happen. Unfortunately, it's just too much of a risk.
A lot of this supply chain issue is around how many books publishers need to print. One of the big ways that they figure that number out is through reader preorders!
If you haven't preordered The Last Dance of the Debutante yet, here's a reminder of what you'll find. In this book, I’ll be inviting you into the glamorous, decadent world of the 1958 London Season—the last time that debutantes were presented to Queen Elizabeth II—and introducing you to Lily. She’s a young woman at a crossroads, with both tradition and progress pulling her in two different directions until she learns of a devastating family secret that changes everything.
Preorder The Last Dance of the Debutante AMAZON US | AMAZON CA | BARNES & NOBLE | BOOKSHOP.ORG INDIGO | AUDIBLE | KOBO | APPLE BOOKS | GOOGLE PLAY ADD THE LAST DANCE OF THE DEBUTANTE ON GOODREADSSeptember 14, 2021
The Last Garden in England is out in paperback!
The Last Garden in England is now out in paperback at all fine retailers.
AMAZON US | AMAZON CA | BARNES & NOBLE | BOOKSHOP.ORG INDIGO | KOBO | APPLE BOOKS | GOOGLE PLAYPresent Day : Emma Lovett, who has dedicated her life to breathing new life into long-neglected gardens, has just been given the opportunity of a lifetime: to restore the gardens of the famed Highbury House, designed in 1907 by her hero Venetia Smith. But as Emma dives deeper into the garden’s past, she begins to uncover secrets that have long been hidden from history.
1907 : A talented artist with a growing reputation for her ambitious work, Venetia Smith has carved out a niche for herself as a garden designer to well-to-do industrialists, solicitors, and bankers looking to show off their wealth with sumptuous country houses. She is determined to make Highbury House a triumph, but the gardens there—and the people she meets—will change her life forever.
1944 : When land girl Beth Pedley arrives at a farm on the outskirts of the village of Highbury, all she wants is to find a place she can call home, while cook Stella Adderton could not be more desperate to leave Highbury House pursue her own dreams. Diana Symonds, a widow and the mistress of the grand house, is desperately trying to cling to her pre-war life now that Highbury House has been requisitioned to become a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers. But when war threatens the gardens at Highbury House, these three women are drawn together by a secret that will last decades.
The Last Garden in England explores the unexpected connections that can cross time and the special places that can bind us together in unbreakable bonds.
ADD THE LAST GARDEN IN ENGLAND ON GOODREADSAs a thank you for buying the book, I’ve created a map of the fictional gardens at Highbury House. This features all of the garden rooms that are described in the book, as well as other little highlights to help orient you as you read the book.
Get the MapMarch 1, 2021
Welcome to The Author's Garden
So many reader have been asking for an update on my garden journey, I wanted to put something together to keep you up to date on what's going on here. For those of you who don't know, I've recently purchased my first home (a flat in London), and with it comes ownership over the back and front gardens. I've been keeping a garden diary since day one, and now I'm making it available to you!
It's called The Author's Garden, and it's already full of posts detailing what I've been doing with my garden so far. Here are some highlights:
A Novel Idea for a Garden goes into details about the garden and where I'm hoping to start: https://www.theauthorsgarden.com/blog/a-novel-idea-for-a-garden
Take a garden tour filmed just a couple days after I arrived: https://www.theauthorsgarden.com/blog/a-garden-tour
Learn why I'm now doing battle with ivy: https://www.theauthorsgarden.com/blog/overtaken-by-ivy
Check out what I did this weekend: https://www.theauthorsgarden.com/blog/1idb4tgndg4x1bkpnvhzs6lshj341d
Meet my new furry friend, Miss Scarlet: https://www.theauthorsgarden.com/blog/dxpmsww1uobj0uzif5zgswphli9k32
February 16, 2021
Designing the Gardens for The Last Garden in England
Writing any historical novel presents a challenge, but when I started The Last Garden in England, I never imagined what it would take to create the world of Highbury House and its fictional gardens.I grew up around gardens. My father is an excellent amateur gardener, creating incredibly lush English borders in the Los Angeles summer heat when I was a child. In those days, I would follow Dad around, digging holes and planting seeds and learning from him as best I could.
Fast forward many years later to summer 2019 when I started writing the book. My English border-loving father was now a resident of the UK with a beautiful English garden of his own. I, however, lived in a second-story London flat (aka first floor for my fellow Brits). I had no garden except for a tiny collection of pots that live behind a wall where most people store their rubbish bins. I’d forgotten an embarrassing number of things that Dad taught me and was reduced to pointing at plants and asking, “What’s that called?” whenever we were in my parents garden.
Despite my lack of adult gardening experience, I jumped in to writing a book about three generations of women connected through an incredible historic garden feet first. Within the first chapter, however, I realized that I was going to need to do something drastic.
I was going to need to design my own fantasy garden.
Creating the Gardens at Highbury HouseIt was fairly obvious that I needed a map. For one thing, this was a big garden I was writing about—big enough that it could conceivably take the better part of a year for a small contemporary restoration company to put the abandoned garden at Highbury House to rights again as Emma, my present-day heroine, does. Secondly, I knew that if I didn’t have a map I would lose track of where everything was.
The first thing I needed to do was come up with a concept. I knew that I wanted different types of spaces in the garden. I also wanted them to tie into a significant meaning for the designer who creates the gardens in 1907, Venetia Smith. After doing some research, I decided that I would build the gardens around the idea of garden rooms or distinct spaces with their own themes.
I listed the garden rooms that I thought would fit my theme best. (No spoilers on what the universal theme is.) First came the Lovers’ Garden, then the Bridal Garden, the Children’s Garden, etc. I tweaked and changed things around as I wrote, but one thing stayed constant: the WInter Garden. This unique space that was in full bloom when the rest of the garden was dormant would be the emotional heart of the book and also the place where the mysteries weaving the three timelines of my story would converge.
Each garden room had to have its own set of plants. The Tea Garden where women would take tea and socialize in 1907 had roses and other “feminine” plants, while the Water Garden was full of lush aquatics. The Lavender Walk was full of different varieties of lavender—I now have very strong opinions about what lavender I would want to plant in a garden—and the Children’s Garden became anchored by four huge cherry trees that would provide a snowy, fragrant curtain to hide under in the spring.
Since I didn’t have a garden of my own to draw inspiration from, I poured over books about English borders and spent more time than I probably should admit on the Gardeners’ World and Royal Horticultural Society websites to make sure that my plant knowledge fit the climate I was writing about. (Growing up in Los Angeles meant lots of things I would naturally have written about wouldn’t be viable in the UK or would have grown a lot slower.) Since roses are significant in the 1907 storyline, I spent a lot of time looking up when varieties that I know well were first established. It turns out, a lot of our modern roses are actually not that old at all.
All of this came together in a hand-drawn map that I kept by my side while writing the book. I went so far as to have it transformed into a hand-painted map by a talented artist whose skills far exceed mine. After finishing The Last Garden in England, I told my family that I had created my dream garden. The place that I would create if I ever was lucky enough to have that much space.
The dream of making the gardens at Highbury House reality might be a long way off, but I’ll be able to live out a little bit of my gardening ambitions this year. I’m moving out of that second-story flat and into a new home. It has a backyard that’s just big enough to let me get creative, and a little pond that I need to learn how to maintain. There’s room for an arbor and bench, a patio, and space for entertaining.
As I create my own garden, I plan to look to my old research for The Last Garden in England. Hopefully, friends and family who come visit might just notice a few favorites from the book growing happily in the borders in a few years time.
To see the full map of the gardens at Highbury House, click here .
January 11, 2021
The Last Garden in England is out now!
The Last Garden in England is now out in bookstores and online!
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Indigo | Apple Books | Kobo | Google PlayPresent Day: Emma Lovett, who has dedicated her life to breathing new life into long-neglected gardens, has just been given the opportunity of a lifetime: to restore the gardens of the famed Highbury House, designed in 1907 by her hero Venetia Smith. But as Emma dives deeper into the garden’s past, she begins to uncover secrets that have long been hidden from history.
1907: A talented artist with a growing reputation for her ambitious work, Venetia Smith has carved out a niche for herself as a garden designer to well-to-do industrialists, solicitors, and bankers looking to show off their wealth with sumptuous country houses. She is determined to make Highbury House a triumph, but the gardens there—and the people she meets—will change her life forever.
1944: When land girl Beth Pedley arrives at a farm on the outskirts of the village of Highbury, all she wants is to find a place she can call home, while cook Stella Adderton could not be more desperate to leave Highbury House pursue her own dreams. Diana Symonds, a widow and the mistress of the grand house, is desperately trying to cling to her pre-war life now that Highbury House has been requisitioned to become a convalescent hospital for wounded soldiers. But when war threatens the gardens at Highbury House, these three women are drawn together by a secret that will last decades.
The Last Garden in England explores the unexpected connections that can cross time and the special places that can bind us together in unbreakable bonds.
Add to GoodreadsJoin the Virtual Book Tour!You can find me celebrating the release of The Last Garden in England at these stops on my virtual book tour.
For details about how to RSVP, go to the Events tab on juliakellywrites.com.
