I’m thrilled to be hosting a tale from the latest project by talented writer friend, E J Newman today. Emma has previously published a brilliantly dark short story collection From Dark Places, and 20 Years Later, a post-apocalyptic YA novel. This is the twenty-second tale in a year and a day of weekly short stories set in The Split Worlds. If you would…
Author Caroline Smailes publishes her new novel today. 99 Reasons Why is a book with a difference. It is only being published as an ebook and comes with 9 different endings which readers can navigate using multiple choice questions on their Kindle or via a spinning story wheel on their iPad or iPhone. There are also two additional endings. One will be…
He dislikes lying to matron. She is, after all, a decent enough person. But if he told her the truth, she would never let him go. She would probably force him to join in more of the activities at the nursing home. He thinks activities a strange choice of word when the home only really has a dimly-lit television lounge,…
Sophie’s in trouble. Must be Tuesday. Sophie Green’s an ex-spy, or trying to be. You wouldn’t believe the trouble she’s in. An MI5 officer has been shot with her gun, her fingerprints all over his office. And no, she didn’t kill him. But she has gone on the run. Now Sophie’s desperately seeking whoever’s trying to frame and kill her….
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being followed around by a book? It doesn’t seem to matter where you go, it’s there. Like the literary equivalent of an earworm. Admittedly, at the moment, I am only going to the library, some bookshops and the supermarket so my world is small but still. It is in ALL of those…
The house was in a kind of mews, not directly on the river. Compact, made of old brick. It was a world away from the backstreets of Hackney where he’d grown up. That was an even longer time ago. Yet another name, and another life. He frowned. He didn’t need stuff like that surfacing. He was American, nowadays – it said so on…
Having already read and enjoyed Christina Courtenay’s previous two novels, Trade Winds and The Scarlet Kimono, you’d think that I would have learned my lesson and left Highland Storms for a weekend when I had some uninterrupted reading time. But no, despite knowing that I find it incredibly hard to put one of her books down, I picked it up on…
I wasn’t going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. Right up until October 27th, I was firmly in the “Been there, Done that, Got the Winner 2010 Blog Badge” camp. And then I had an email exchange with a Twitter pal… …and, as you can tell from the shiny new blog badge, I decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year,…
Betrayed by his brother and his childhood love, Brice Kinross needs a fresh start. So he welcomes the opportunity to leave Sweden for the Scottish Highlands to take over the family estate. But there’s trouble afoot at Rosyth in 1754 and Brice finds himself unwelcome. The estate’s in ruin and money is disappearing. He discovers an ally in Marsaili Buchanan,…
If I tell you that Jane Austen is one of my favourite authors and has been since I was a teenager; that Persuasion is not only my favourite of all her books but one of my all-time favourite books; and that Captain Wentworth is my favourite literary hero, then you’ll probably understand why I might have been slow to flick open…