The locked-room murder mystery that she’s neatly stitched it into is entirely her own creation but the inspiration behind Hope Adams’ novel Dangerous Women is the Rajah quilt, an actual quilt made by convicts on their 1841 voyage of transportation from London to Van Diemen’s Land. (What we now know as Tasmania, Australia’s island state, following a name change in…
Emma Stonex takes as her inspiration for The Lamplighters a real event from 1900, where three lighthouse keepers vanished from the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides. Moving the action to Cornwall in 1972 and making hers a rock lighthouse, fifteen miles off the coast from Lands End, she creates a compelling locked room mystery together…
21 January is one of our favourite days here at Nut Press because it’s Squirrel Appreciation Day, which means extra helpings of nuts for Squizzey and the squirrel crew who work so tirelessly (at least a full afternoon a week!) behind the scenes to make him and this blog look good, and the outdoor squirrels, who get a bonus feed…
Tammye Huf’s debut novel A More Perfect Union is a remarkable love story—one inspired by that of her great great grandparents—between an Irish immigrant and a household slave he encounters on a Virginian plantation, and their attempt to overcome every obstacle and prejudice to be together. Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape poverty and famine in Ireland,…
Kate Marshall dives into a new case in Shallow Sands, the second book in this exciting new series from Robert Bryndza, when an initial discovery of hers brings something altogether more disturbing to the surface. When Kate Marshall finds the bloated body of a young man floating in the Shadow Sands reservoir, the authorities label it a tragic accident. But…
Sally Magnusson’s The Ninth Child is a winning blend of folklore and historical fiction incorporating real people, places and engineering projects, all brought to the shores of Loch Katrine in 1856, where the boundary between our world and the land of faery is in danger of being disturbed. Loch Katrine, 1856. Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor…
Tyler Keevil’s novel Your Still Beating Heart begins with a random and unimaginable tragedy, which dramatically alters the trajectory of one woman’s life, and those she’ll now encounter along the way. All it takes to change your life is a single moment. A random stabbing on a London bus leaves a young woman widowed and detached from her previous world. Stripped of a…
In Jennie Fields’ Cold War novel Atomic Love, a once brilliant scientist, who was fired from the Manhattan Project, finds herself wrestling with intense and conflicting emotions when an ex-colleague and former lover suddenly comes back into her life and the FBI pressures her to get close to him again. Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations – in…
Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s love letter to the books in her life, and how they’ve influenced and shaped her, while also providing a source of comfort and connection with others. For as long as she can remember, Cathy Rentzenbrink has lost and found herself in stories. Growing up she was rarely seen without…
Nydia Hetherington’s A Girl Made of Air twirled across my Twitter timeline with its stunning cover earlier this summer and, as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to read it. This is the story of The Greatest Funambulist Who Ever Lived… Born into a post-war circus family, our nameless star was unwanted and forgotten, abandoned in the…