Global Girls Online Book Club

Later today and tomorrow, I will be author of the day on the Facebook group GGOBC which I am very much looking forward to. I am going to be telling everyone how my books came into being and hoping for a few more readers, especially in Australia where most members of the group are from.

I was surprised to see yesterday that my press release to the Great Yarmouth Mercury had been published. I think it must only have been online because I didn’t see it the physical paper, but hey, any publicity is good.

Reviews for my new book are slow but the three that I have had are excellent. It takes time, I know that from past experience, but sales are steadily creeping up despite my inability to do any marketing.

In nine days, I will be heading back to Australia with Sadie’s granddaughter. Remember Sadie’s Wars?

We are taking in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney and catching up with old and new family and friends along the way. I didn’t think I would be making the journey again but Sadie’s granddaughter longed to see where her beloved granny used to live. How could I not jump at that opportunity.

Having had a glut of apples, I now have a glut of pears. This week, I found that by stewing pears until you forget they are on the stove, you end up with caramalised pears which are delicious for breakfast with yoghurt. Who knew?

Reviews of Isabella’s Curse

Well, the first reviews are in. Only one 5* is showing on Amazon UK, the other one is on Amazon Italy – but what a review. It blew me away.

I confess that I knew Rosemary Noble at primary school, how was I to suspect then that she would turn into a present-day Brontë? Knowing that I was going to write a review of Isabella’s Curse, I spent at least 100 pages comparing the vile Francis Croke to Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights, only to find on page 222, the author draws the parallel quite openly herselfthe clever kitten/vixen (whichever she prefers!) I’m astonished that Rosemary Noble is such a maestra of plotting that she can entwine two perfect plots in one novel without a false slip. I’d love to learn how it’s done! I won’t give any spoilers here, but the novel spans the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Norfolk with brilliant descriptive prowess. Do yourself a favour and read this 5-star masterpiece.

Little does John know that I plot in my head. Nothing is written down, other than familial relationships. I have a fantastic memory though, maybe an elephant in a past life! I know lots of authors who are super organised with post it notes and cards and timelines. I can’t work like that. My notebooks are for to do lists, maybe for noting what needs editing but for a book which took my three years to write, these are my notes. I would be interested to know if anyone else works like this. I am sure plenty will be prepared to criticise me for not having a proper plan. The other books which took a year to write didn’t have plans wither although I roughly knew what should happen when, after all, they were based on ancestors’ lives. However, they took on lives of their own, went in directions I didn’t expect, characters appeared out of the blue.

This book started with a place, a prologue and an image. It evolved from there.

I am please to say that I have received the paperback proof from Amazon. It looks fine so I will be releasing the paperback on October 4th as planned.

An Author Friend Shares My Book Launch

Launch Feature – Rosemary Noble

Thanks Patricia Osborne for the plug. It’s always delightful with author friends share your news. I have Patricia’s book on my kindle to read. As I have some long flights ahead, I hope to catch up with books by several author friends.

The launch is going well with several books sold and my first review about to drop.

It’s a weekend of celebration as we raised a glass last night at our favourite Portuguese Restaurant to celebrate 55 years of marriage with our grandchildren and their parents.

Paperback

Yesterday, I worked solidly on the paperback of Isabella’s Curse, thanks to non-stop rain which kept me indoors. I am just putting it on Amazon for the moment. If I go down the Ingram Spark route, I need an ISBN or rather a block because it makes no economic sense to buy one. Anyway, I am pleased to say that I managed to convert my document into a pdf in the correct format without too much of a problem and have ordered a proof copy. Yay! It’s only four days until the E-book releases, always a nervous time. I did a press release for the local paper today. I wonder whether they will include it. To order from Amazon https://mybook.to/isabcurse or https://books2read.com/u/mYOgjp from Apple, Kobo etc.

Isabella’s Curse is heavily influenced by art. I was lucky enough to go to two London exhibitions and the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich (above). I needed to know the lay-out, the environment in early Spring and the kind of art works being displayed. I also went to the Spanish Art exhibition at the Royal Academy. All the exhibits there were on loan from the Hispanic Society in New York and included art from Latin America and the Caribbean like the beautiful Mexican shawl above and the black child with his bowl of fruit as well as artists like Goya.

Sometimes you absorb ideas from such visits that will creep into your writing, sometimes it’s like a lightbulb moment. Certainly finding out about the Hispanic Society was a lightbulb moment.

The other major exhibition was the Singer Sargent exhibition at Tate Britain last year. It was stunning and I learnt so much about Singer Sargent and the way he worked and where he worked as well as giving me the model for my Spanish artist, although he was a doctor in real life.

Inspirations for Isabella’s Curse

Available to pre-order https://books2read.com/u/mYOgjp

or from Amazon https://mybook.to/isabcurse

How did I develop the story for Isabella’s Curse?

My main inspiration was the ruined church less than a mile from my house. Countryfile even featured it. The oak tree sprouting from the nave is sometimes called the witches leg because of the story that a witch with a wooden leg died there. I did not want my book to be about witches so needed another reason which the prologue explains.

I wanted a manor for a setting but there is a manor there already so I needed to create a mythical village and a manor with a different name. I chose the architecture of Felbrigg Hall, although on a much smaller scale. I liked that it had been built in two different eras and no attempt had been made to make the newer wing look like the old wing. The old house is very early Jacobean and the new wing looks Georgian although still built in the seventeenth century – a bit early for my story but needs must.

I also had had in mind the painting of Dido Elizabeth Belle in the back of my mind since 2019. I wasn’t sure why or how or even whether it was relevant to anything. I had first seen a copy at Kenwood Hall and then the original last year at the palace of Scone.

Gradually, the idea of a painting in a manor next to the ruined church took hold. Add a mysterious woman, the Spanish Lady and a curse which has haunted the family for two hundred years and the story began to form.

Next, I needed a source of tension and a Black History Walk around Norwich City Centre provided it. The abolitionist movement was strong in Norwich in the late 18th and early 19th century Norwich. But what if the subject divided families?

I also needed a modern day story. I chose a no-nonsense female archivist who is engaged to find records of the paintings in the house so that Sotheby’s can sell them. She is thrust into the intrigue of the house and its owners, somewhat reluctantly.

Next time, I will show you some more of the artistic inspirations.

Isabella’s Curse

At last, my new book Isabella’s Curse is available to pre-order. It publishes as an Ebook on September 20th 2025 for the princely sum of 1.99 in the UK. It’s a dual timeline mystery set in Norfolk England with a touch of the supernatural.

Here is the link to Amazon https://mybook.to/isabcurse but it’s also available on other platforms https://books2read.com/u/mYOgjp

I will be working on the paperback shortly.

In the meantime I have a slot on the Facebook site – Global Girls Book Club at the end of October where I will be writing about all my books. Their biggest readership is in Australia so I am super excited about that.

That takes place just a week before I set off to Australia with Carol, a cousin by marriage and granddaughter of Sadie in Sadie’s Wars. We will be visiting Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, then time with friends in NSW.

It’s a bit of a whistlestop tour. I wonder if I will discover a new story.

In the meantime, I have taken out an Ancestry subscription for three months and already found out that my great grandmother (a bit of a mystery herself) hailed not far from here, near Beccles in Suffolk. I look forward to mooching around the area.

Death at the Sign of the Rook

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

What a joy this book is. Lovers of Kate Atkinson’s books will be pleased to see Jackson Brodie’s return, but this is not your usual detective book rather a pastiche of the genre.

A host of characters, a snowstorm and lonely Yorkshire manor house hosting an expensive murder mystery weekend is the setting for the book’s denouement.

Some reviewers say they were disappointed that it wasn’t a normal Jackson Brodie mystery. I say it was Kate Atkinson poking fun at the likes of Agatha Christie, Richard Osman and Robert Galbraith (aka J K Rowling). We even had a veteran of the Afghan conflict minus a leg or rather The Leg, as an heroic though tortured figure – more handsome than Cormoron Strike, it has to be said.

There is a vicar who had lost both his faith and his voice, the dowager lady of the manor who despises her children but with more guts than any of her progeny and a female art thief, a mistress of disguises, who Jackson Brodie is commissioned to investigate.

The writing is sublime with so many laugh out loud moments and when it descends into a Brian Rix type farce as the murder mystery actors strut, or rather stutter, their stuff with an escaped homicidal maniac mixed up in the action, I had to pause to recover my equilibrium.

Over the top, yes, but deliberately so. Kate Atkinson must have had so much fun plotting and writing this. It puts all of the other writers in this genre to shame. I am speechless with admiration. Read it as a very clever spoof.

I borrowed this from the Libby App from Norfolk Libraries. There is a waiting list.

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See – book review

I have read several books by Lisa See, an American writer of Chinese extraction, and enjoyed them for their strong female characters and the research into tea growing and ancient Chinese medicine for example. I always learn something new from her books.

The Island of Sea Women, I would suggest, is her best yet. The setting is Jeju Island, off the coast of South Korea. It is an island where women are trained by their mothers to dive for sea creatures from an early age, a dangerous and skilled occupation but one which supports their families. The men take care of the children and do a little cooking, but this is a description of a matriarchal society. The portrayal of the life of these women, and the sea both above and beneath is absolutely fascinating. Imagine free diving to a depth of twenty metres in winter in nothing but a cotton bathing suit for hours. Yet generations of women did this. I had to watch a video of the last generation of haenyeo (the collective noun for these women). I had not realised how famous they were. Some even went into labour whilst diving. Medical experiments were conducted later to find out they could survive hypothermia.

The action takes place over decades between 1938 and 2008 and follows two girls, Yoon-Suk and Mi-ja, who develop a lasting friendship until it fractures, irrevocably. The main story takes us through the Japanese Occupation, the aftermath of war leading to the separation of North and South Korea, the American Occupation and the societal damage all that caused.

The insight into the culture of the Haenyeo is deep and satisfying. Read it for that alone.

The story of the decades of trauma and violence done to the people of Jeju is yet another example of man’s inhumanity. Beware – it is brutal. I know little about the history of Korea and now I know more but I remain unclear about the drivers of the violence because it is told from Yoon-Suk’s point of view, and she is just trying to survive and keep her family alive. Certainly, the wish for independence is mixed up with the fear of communism, not helped by the American influence at that time.

The other theme is forgiveness as Yoon-Suk holds onto her anger and hatred for Mi-ja, refusing to speak about what happened until she is forced to confront it, decades later. This refusal to discuss is mirrored by the authorities who supressed the truth about what happened and instituted a policy of guilt by association on the population of the island.

Were there somethings I didn’t like about the book or which seemed inconsistent, yes, but they tended to be minor. This book will be long remembered.

Ring the Hill by Tom Cox

How to describe this book? That in itself is an enigma. It’s a book about hills but it is so much more. It’s about his much beloved cats, about nature, his love of swimming and walking, his parents, Devon, Somerset and the Peak District, with a mention of Norfolk. Hares – there is a whole chapter on hares (with lots of walking involved). You just need to go with his flow, accept where he takes you and enjoy the experience.

I fell into this book, thinking it may be a suitable present for someone, but I could not put it down. Tom Cox writes in a humorous, quirky style which ranges widely and freely, defying genre.

It is an antidote to modern life. It meanders, it rambles as he describes his house moves and discovery of his new locations by walking everywhere, anywhere, in all seasons but mostly uphill. He describes the myths about places and place names, the people he meets, the oddest characters but always described with affection.

His humour is self-deprecating and his descriptions vivid. Having moved on a whim to the Peak District to a house on a hill which never ends, he describes the winter.

The whiteness of the days always seemed deeply dark and the blackness of the nights was a sharp blade. On rare windless afternoons the tyre swing in the garden still rocked from side to side, as if comforting itself after a traumatic experience.

He swiftly escaped back to the softer climes of Somerset after experiencing that very harsh winter, his whim turning into a stiff endurance test.

Second Sleep by Robert Harris

While I don’t think this is one of Robert Harris’s best books, it has left me with lots to think about. The action takes place 800 years in the future, which is not obvious to begin with as we are back in a world which resembles medieval England. It is a world where the Church is in control. There is a king but no mention of government or parliament. A priest, Christopher Fairfax, is sent by the bishop from Exeter to conduct the funeral of a parish priest in an isolated village. The priest died in somewhat mysterious circumstances.

Fairfax is in his twenties and owes the Church his life and education after his parents died. In this world people die young and of fevers. The world, or rather the Church, has turned its back on all things scientific. Libraries and books have been destroyed. Knowledge has gone.

It is an England where the countryside is alive with the sound of insects and birdsong, and meadows are full of wildflowers, where the villagers weave, where horse travel is the norm.

Fairfax discovers forbidden books in the rectory which leads him to the reason that everything changed in the year 2025.

The reason is something I have thought about before, not climate change, not war, nor a pandemic but something that would lead the world into panic within a week or less. Do contingency plans exist? Who knows? I would like to be assured that they do but it’s not something I have seen discussed.

So, despite the book being somewhat unsatisfactory in its plot and ending, I am pleased that I read it because I will think about it for a long time.