Hotel On Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully #BlogTour @Legend_Press #HotelOnShadowLake

When Maya was a girl, her grandmother was everything to her: teller of magical fairy tales, surrogate mother, best friend. Then her grandmother disappeared without a trace, leaving Maya with only questions to fill the void. Twenty-seven years later, her grandmother’s body is found in a place she had no connection to. 

Desperate for answers, Maya begins to unravel secrets that go back decades, from 1910s New York to 1930s Germany and beyond. But when she begins to find herself spinning her own lies in order to uncover what happened, she must decide whether her life, and a chance at love, are worth risking for the truth.

Hotel On Shadow Lake by Daniela Tully was published by Legend Press on 1 February 2018, my thanks to the publisher who invited me to take part on this Blog Tour.

I'm delighted to welcome the author, Daniela Tully to Random Things today. She's talking about the books that are special to her, in My Life In Books.

My Life in Books - Daniela Tully

At school I was a slightly overweight nerd who wrote into every Poesiealbum (what we Germans call friendship books), that one day I wanted to become a Bibliothekarin, German for librarian, which at that age (around 7/8) was a long and difficult word to spell. And still, each time I went through the trouble of writing it into those books. I obviously had a very wrong idea of what a librarian really does. 
Back in those days, I thought you could sit in that historic Tudor style building where our library was located and read books all day long (Wouldn’t that be beautiful?). 

The first series of books I remember were Astrid Lindgren’s books – oh, how much I loved them. Pippi Longstocking, this girl deeply fascinated me. I wanted to be her! I often felt like an outsider, and so was she, but she carried it so well, her happiness and carelessness were contagious. And I wanted to be her best friend. 
I also devoured Emil aus Lönneberga, Pippi’s naughty male version. Then of course there was Michael Ende’s The Never Ending Story, which changed the way I looked at books – forever, and irreversibly.

I also have fond memories of Enid Blyton’s Hanni und Nanni, and about the twin’s everyday life in a boarding school. Only they could make a boarding school sound intriguing. My father sometimes threatened me with sending me to boarding school when I had done something wrong (he regrets it now, he has always been a wonderful father), so I quickly conjured up the image of Hanni and Nanni and thought that it might not be so bad after all.

And after that I don’t remember a book for a longer time.


I think I banned those books from my memory that we were forced to read in school. The only two books I remembered from school were Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies, the latter gave me nightmares, of me running away from the mob ad being grilled in the end. (What a whuss I was!). 

At university it was somewhat different, I didn’t feel forced to read all the novels we had (some I did hate), but it felt more like a privilege that I was asked to read them and spend time with them. Two titles I would point out here: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and last but not least, Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. A world that was so skillfully mirrored in one of my all time favorites movies, Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others.

And as I read through my list of my chosen books one more time, I realized that I’ve always delighted in great stories about outsiders, people who feel out of place, characters who don’t fit in, so it doesn’t surprise me that my protagonists in Hotel on Shadow Lake are also outsiders.


I did this totally subconsciously. Thank you, randomthingsthroughmyletterbox for making me aware of it!

Daniela Tully - February 2018 

Daniela was born in Germany, and has lived all over the world, including Mexico, New York and Dubai. As a film-maker she has been involved in projects such as the critically-acclaimed Fair Game, box-office hits Contagion and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, as well as the Oscar-winning The Help.

Hotel On Shadow Lake is her first novel.