The Great Silence by Doug Johnstone BLOG TOUR @doug_johnstone @OrendaBooks #TheGreatSilence #TheSkelfs #BookReview

 

Keeping on top of the family funeral directors’ and private-investigation businesses is no easy task for the Skelf women, and when matriarch Dorothy discovers a human foot while walking the dog, a perplexing case presents itself … with potentially deadly results.
 
Daughter Jenny and grand-daughter Hannah have their hands full too: The mysterious circumstances of a dying woman lead them into an unexpected family drama, Hannah's new astrophysicist colleague claims he's receiving messages from outer space, and the Skelfs' teenaged lodger has yet another devastating experience.
 
Nothing is clear as the women are immersed ever deeper in their most challenging cases yet. But when the daughter of Jenny’s violent and fugitive ex-husband goes missing without trace and a wild animal is spotted roaming Edinburgh's parks, real danger presents itself, and all three Skelfs are in peril.     
 
Taut, dark, warmly funny and unafraid to ask big questions – of us all – The Great Silence is the much-anticipated third instalment in the addictive, unforgettable Skelfs series, and the stakes are higher than ever.

The Great Silence by Doug Johnstone was published in paperback by Orenda Books on 19 August 2021 and is the third book in The Skelfs series. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review, as part of this Blog Tour. 

I am a huge fan of Doug Johnstone's writing and The Skelfs series has a special place in my heart. I have been looking forward to The Great Silence ever since I finished the last of the series. 

Whilst you could read The Great Silence as a stand alone story, I do think, with this series, readers will benefit from reading the first two books; A Dark Matter (2019) and The Big Chill (2020) - both of these are currently available for Kindle at just 99p each. 

For anyone who isn't familiar with the series, The Skelfs are an Edinburgh family of three generations of women. The family have been undertakers for over one hundred years, and they also have a private investigation firm. The family is made up of Dorothy, in her seventies and originally from California; her daughter Jenny; mid-forties, divorced and living with her mother, and Jenny's daughter Hannah. Twenty-one, recently graduated from University and living nearby with her girlfriend Indy.

The family are quirky and unusual and incredibly loyal to each other. They may annoy each other sometimes, but they've been through such a lot, in a relatively short time, that there's really nothing that will destroy their family now. 

The story opens as Dorothy walks her dog Einstein across Brunsfield Links, in the city. Einstein goes off to explore the undergrowth and returns with a severed human foot in his mouth! Dorothy is one of those women who takes this in her stride, bundling it up into a dog-poo bag, taking it home and then calling in Thomas; local police officer, and also her boyfriend. 

This severed foot is just the beginning of a series of complex cases that the Skelfs are faced with, and not only do they have these outside occurrence to take up their time, they also have their own personal family issues that continue to rear their ugly heads. Not least, Jenny's ex-husband; an on-the-run murderer who is determined to get his revenge on his estranged family. 

Along with the Skelf women, there's a cast of supporting characters who add such depth to the plot lines. There's Thomas, black, Swedish, widowed and much younger than Dorothy. We have Indy; Hannah's girlfriend who is faced with the prospect of reliving the tragic deaths of her parents when her grandparents arrive from overseas, and there are the animals; incredible characters with personalities that match the humans for sure. 

Whilst a team of female detectives-cum-undertakers could sound a bit cosy crime, I can assure you that it is not! Doug Johnstone interweaves some really important and often disturbing themes into his storylines and is not afraid of a little violence or gore. There's a dark undercurrent of menace that pervades the story, with a brooding and hungry big cat on the loose, desperate and disturbed characters appearing from the past, and the damaging effects of grief just a few of the issues that are dealt with. 

With short, sharp chapters, alternating between the three female leads, this could be confusing, there's a lot packed into it. However, it's never a difficult read, it can be challenging, subject-wise, but the writing is excellent and the plot flows freely throughout. 

It's been an absolute delight to return to the incredible Skelf family. I have a lot of love for these characters, and the incredible Edinburgh setting. Doug Johnstone is an incredible talent. I adore this book. 

Doug Johnstone is the author of twelve previous novels, most recently The Big Chill (2020). 

Several of his books have been bestsellers and three, A Dark Matter (2020), Breakers (2019) and The Jump (2015), were shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. 

He’s taught creative writing and been writer in residence at various institutions over the last decade – including at a funeral parlour ahead of writing A Dark Matter – and has been an arts journalist for over twenty years. 

Doug is a songwriter and musician with five albums and three solo EPs released, and he plays drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers. 

He’s also player-manager of the Scotland Writers Football Club. 

He lives in Edinburgh. 

Follow Doug on Twitter @doug_johnstone and visit his website: dougjohnstone.com.

No Honour by Awais Khan BLOG TOUR @AwaisKhanAuthor #NoHonour @OrendaBooks #Abida #BookReview

 

In sixteen-year-old Abida’s small Pakistani village, there are age-old rules to live by, and her family’s honour to protect. And, yet, her spirit is defiant and she yearns to make a home with the man she loves.

When the unthinkable happens, Abida faces the same fate as other young girls who have chosen unacceptable alliances – certain, public death. Fired by a fierce determination to resist everything she knows to be wrong about the society into which she was born, and aided by her devoted father, Jamil, who puts his own life on the line to help her, she escapes to Lahore and then disappears.

Jamil goes to Lahore in search of Abida – a city where the prejudices that dominate their village take on a new and horrifying form – and father and daughter are caught in a world from which they may never escape.

Moving from the depths of rural Pakistan, riddled with poverty and religious fervour, to the dangerous streets of over-populated Lahore, No Honour is a story of family, of the indomitable spirit of love in its many forms … a story of courage and resilience, when all seems lost, and the inextinguishable fire that lights one young woman’s battle for change.

No Honour by Awais Khan was published in paperback by Orenda Books on 19 August 2021. My thanks to the publisher who sent my copy for review, as part of this Blog Tour.

Honour : a quality that combines respect, being proud, and honesty

(Definition from the Cambridge Dictionary)

I often find it difficult, as a Westerner. to criticise other cultures. Who am I to decide if something is right or wrong? What right have I to judge other cultures? I try to be open-minded when reading about things that I know little about, I try to understand tradition. 

However, I make no apologies for stating here that there is no honour at all in murder. None, whatsoever. Do not try to justify murder by telling me that the victim was dishonourable and has let down her family. Do not try to tell me that an unmarried woman, or child in many cases, is evil and lustful. Do not try to tell me that the innocent baby born out of wedlock is wicked and shameful. 

I am not the only person to think this. Many many people in Pakistan agree with me. In fact, 'honour killings (known locally in the country as karo-kari) are abhorred by many and there have been legal reforms in the country, allowing strict punishment to the perpetrators. Honour killing victims are not only females; males too are targeted. 

Awais Khan's startling and incredibly emotive story concerns the death and ill treatment of females in Pakistan and it is a book that continues to haunt me, days after finishing it. It is a story based in truth, written with honesty and passion and one that I urge everyone to read. It is not an easy read by any means, but it is so incredibly important. 

The opening scenes of No Honour are shocking, taking place in the early morning on the banks of a river in a small Pakistan village. A young girl gives birth to a child, and almost immediately afterwards she is taken from her home, along with the child and dealt with by the villagers. These are not strangers to her, these are the people that she has known since she was a baby, these are her family. It is raw and emotional and hard to read.

The two main characters in No Honour are Abida; another young teenager, and her father Jamil. Jamil differs to most men in their small village. He has his own honour, passed down to him from his mother, and his honour is true. He struggles with the expectation that as a man, he is expected to beat his wife, and demand sex. When Jamil's suspicions about his eldest, and favourite daughter Abida are proved to be true, he knows exactly what she will face. 

Whilst Abida is, in some ways, an innocent and naive teenager who has never left the small village that she grew up in, she has also inherited some of her grandmother's strengths. She is determined that she will not be another victim of the villager's idea of honour and is able to escape, along with her boyfriend to the sprawling city of Lahore. 

It is in Lahore that her worst nightmares come true and there are times when Abida wonders if it may have been better to stay at home and meet her fate. 

The city is dirty, poverty stricken and full of people who will take advantage of her and her husband. There is violence and drugs and unbearable tragedy around every corner. As Abida moves from a filthy apartment, to the faded splendour of a whore house and then to the mansion house of a drug dealer, her loyal and loving father also faces his own precarious journey. 

It is rare that I have to set down a book to take a breather. The absolute pain and utter desolation of Abida's situation became unbearable for me at times, and I had to do just that. Set it aside, gather myself together and breathe, before I could continue. 

Awais Khan's writing is masterful. He captures the small village community and then the sprawling city life so very well. It is enthralling; the sights, the sounds, the smells are described so vividly and with such authenticity, there is no doubt that this is an author who knows exactly what he is writing about. 

As we look around our world and see and hear about the terrible things that are happening throughout, it can be difficult to read about it in fiction too. However, for me, this book gave me an awareness and an insight into the whys and the hows, far more than any TV news broadcast will ever do. Whilst the subject matter is shocking, it is never exploitative, it is never done purely for the shock factor. It is sensitively and often beautifully captured.

This is a very special book. One that will stay with me forever, and one that I will re-read, for sure.

Highly recommended, and is now up there as one of my books of the year so far. 

Awais Khan is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Durham University, and studied creative writing with Faber Academy.  

His debut novel, In the Company of Strangers, was published to much critical acclaim, and he now regularly appears on TV and radio. 

Awais also teaches a popular online creative writing course to aspiring writers around the world. 

He lives in Lahore and is currently working on his third novel. 

Follow Awais on Twitter @AwaisKhanAuthor.

Love In A Time Of Hate by Matthew Langdon Cost BLOG TOUR @MattCost8 @RandomTTours #LoveInATimeOfHate #BookExtract

 

A young man from Maine fights for social equality in New Orleans after the Civil War while pursuing a serial killer, becoming enmeshed in voodoo, and falling in love. 

Much like Louisiana's famous gumbo, Love in A Time Of Hate: New Orleans During Reconstruction is a spicy dish of varied ingredients. The main theme is the struggle for social equality between Whites, Blacks, and Creoles, but flavor is added with the subplots of politics, voodoo, murder, love, and hate. 

New Orleans becomes a literal battleground as carpetbaggers, scalawags, Creoles, and recently freed slaves fight against the entrenched southern plantation notion of white superiority.

Love In A Time Of Hate by Matthew Langdon Cost was published in August 2021.

As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today.

Extract from Love In A Time of Hate 

July 30, 1866

Emmett Collins watched in helpless trepidation as the mobs below threatened to erupt into violence over the precise actions he was participating in at this very moment. It reminded him of that

hushed lull seconds before the rebel yell had echoed across the way and Confederate soldiers had come spilling out in a frantic charge. Perhaps New Orleans was not yet ready for Black suffrage, he thought with mounting apprehension. What would General Chamberlain do in this situation? He’d probably stride out into the melee and sternly talk sense into the horde, but that wasn’t in the bailiwick of an eighteen-year-old from rural Maine washed up on the shores of New Orleans after four years of war. He’d been in the South for almost a year now, but still didn’t understand the politics and the culture of the people. He felt like he’d gone to a foreign country without knowing the language.

The Special Convention at the Mechanic’s Institute on Black suffrage had immediately experienced complications when its members fell short of a quorum due to threats of violence and intimidation from Conservative Democrats. The sergeant-at-arms had fought his way out to the street through the mass of white protestors in front of the building to go in search of the necessary representatives. It was then that a rising crescendo surging down Burgundy Street signaled the arrival of the Black former Union soldiers come to support the convention. The thirty-eight appointees in attendance, predominantly white, almost entirely from the north of Louisiana, crowded to the windows overlooking Dryades Street, while the gallery of over a hundred, mostly Black, audience members remained seated.

As the cavalcade of approximately 200 Blacks reached the end of Burgundy, there was the slightest pause as they regarded the waiting crowd across the wide Canal Street. This thoroughfare had originally been designed with a waterway running down the center, a notion still unrealized, and had instead become the unofficial dividing line between two territories, one home to white supremacy, the other to Black equality. With an intake of breath, the marchers squared their shoulders and began to traverse this no-man’s land, many wearing the blue uniforms they’d earned fighting for freedom and unity. Shoulder to shoulder, these former slaves and soldiers marched across the street to show their resolve in gaining the liberty and equality they perceived to be their due. Why couldn’t they have just stayed home, Emmett wondered, asking under his breath? What good would they accomplish arriving en masse and in uniform at the most delicate moment of this convention, the seating of those whose purpose was gaining the right to vote for Black men?

Over the years, Matthew Langdon Cost (aka Matt Cost) has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore,
and a gym. 

He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable. During those years—since age eight, actually—his true passion has been writing. I Am Cuba: Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution (Encircle Publications, March, 2020) was his first traditionally published novel. Mainely Power, the first of the Mainely Mysteries featuring private detective Goff Langdon, was published by Encircle in September of 2020, followed by book two, Mainely Fear

(December, 2020), and book three, Mainely Money (March, 2021). Also forthcoming from

Encircle Publications are his Clay Wolfe / Port Essex Mystery series: Wolfe Trap, Mind

Trap, and Mouse Trap ; as well as his new historical fiction novel, Love in a Time of Hate.

www.mattcost.net

Twitter @MattCost8

The Beloved Girls by Harriet Evans BLOG TOUR @HarrietEvans @headlinepg @RandomTTours #TheBelovedGirls #BookReview

 

Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?

The answer lies buried in the past.

It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. And she and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . .

The Beloved Girls by Harriet Evans was published on 19 August 2021 by Headline. 

As part of this #RandomThingTours Blog Tour, I am delighted to share my review with you today.

This review was originally published in S Magazine

Catherine is a high-flying barrister, but she has been unsettled ever since a mysterious figure from her past made an unexpected appearance at her chambers.

She's about to leave for a trip to Paris with her husband, when she disappears. 

Her husband and two children struggle to shed light upon her disappearance.

Catherine's past is a closed book. They know almost nothing about her childhood, though they do know that she left home on her 18th birthday, never to return.

And this secret past holds the key to Catherine's disappearance. So Harriet Evans whisks us back to 1989 as young Jane Lestrange pays her first visit to Vanes, a West Country manor house belonging to the Hunter family.

The connections between Jane's father and the Hunters is unclear but Jane's life becomes interwoven with them all - father Charles, mother Sylvia, twins Kitty and Joss, and younger sister Merry. 

Jane also takes part in an ancient family ritual in which the family open the honeycombs in their derelict chapel. However, the ritual goes horribly wrong with tragic consequences that will impact on everyone involved for years to come. 

What happened during the ritual in 1989? Where is Catherine and what made her run away from her own life? 

Catherine and Jane's unreliable narratives add to the intrigue as tensions builds slowly to a chilling conclusion. 

This is an absorbing, sweeping drama to get lost in. 

Harriet Evans is the author of several top ten bestsellers including the Sunday Times bestselling The Garden of Lost and Found and Richard and Judy bookclub selection The Wildflowers. 

She used to work in publishing and now writes full time, when she is not being distracted by her children, other books, sewing projects, puzzles, gardening, and her much-loved collection of jumpsuits. 

Last year, she and her family moved from London to Bath.

Twitter @HarrietEvans
Instagram @harrietevansauthor

Dear Grace by Clare Swatman BLOG TOUR @clareswatman #DearGrace @RandomTTours #BookReview

 

The most unlikely friendship. The most unexpected consequences.

When Anna’s husband cheats on her, she’s sure she’ll never be happy again. But then she meets 94-year-old Grace. Despite an age gap of more than fifty years, the pair set out together on a life-changing journey halfway across the country in search of some answers.

Sometimes the only way to move on is to revisit the past. But will Anna and Grace be prepared for what they find?

A story about love, female friendship, heartbreak and learning to forgive.

Dear Grace by Clare Swatman was published on 25 June 2021. I'm delighted to share my review as part of this #RandomThingsTours blog tour today.

Having really enjoyed Clare Swatman's previous two novels, I was really looking forward to reading Dear Grace. This author has such a knack for creating realistic characters who the reader can really relate to, and she has done it again in this endearing and uplifting story of friendship and discovery. 

Anna is in her forties and going through a divorce. She's living in a bland flat with no soul as she waits for the marital home to be sold. She no longer has a car and travels to work as a carer on a motorcycle. It's fair to say that she's fed up and doubting herself. She thinks longingly of the home that she created with her ex, the house that she loved so much. She remembers the pain she felt when she found out that her husband was cheating on her. She feels washed up and fears that she will never be happy again. 

Grace is Anna's newest client. Ninety-four years old and recently widowed, she's as independent as she can be, but welcomes Anna's visits, even though she's really not in need of a great deal of care.

Anna and Grace click immediately. Despite the vast age-gap, Grace seems to know just exactly what Anna is going through, she's perceptive, sometimes blunt, but always right. Grace feels that her age allows her a touch of honesty that Anna may not get from those who know her well. 

Having lived for over ninety years, Grace has many stories of her own, and as she slowly reveals her past to Anna, their bond becomes tighter. 

The only fly in the ointment is Tom; Grace's great-nephew. Tom is very protective of his Aunt and has suspicions about Anna's motives, whilst Grace would like nothing more than for Tom and Anna to get closer, and Anna is really not interested at all. 

I honestly don't think there is anything more valuable than a strong female friendship and Dear Grace shows how two people from different eras, with different backgrounds can form a bond that becomes unbreakable. This story is an utter delight, and whilst there are sadnesses and heartbreak at times, there is also so much joy and understanding of the human nature. 

Perceptive, moving and a delight to read. Once more Clare Swatman proves that she can create characters to love and a story to get lost in. 

Clare Swatman is an author and journalist. She has had two previous novels published, with her debut, Before You Go, selling in 22 territories around the world. She has also spent 20 years writing for women's magazines in the UK.

Her latest novel, Dear Grace, is inspired by her love of Lowestoft, the town where she spent many happy holidays with her late grandparents.

Clare lives in Hertfordshire in the UK with her husband and two boys. Even the cat is male, which means she's destined to be outnumbered forever.

You can find out more about her books at www.clareswatmanauthor.com, or follow her on Facebook at Clare Swatman Author, Insta @clareswatmanauthor, and twitter, where she's @clareswatman

In Search of the Blue Duck by James Bloom BLOG TOUR #InSearchOfTheBlueDuck #JamesBloom @DogberryLtd @RandomTTours #BookExtract

 

In the summer of 1985, fresh out of an elite American college, a young man is handed a job as a suit on Wall Street to which he is totally unsuited. As soon as he has his second paycheck, he buys a round the world air ticket and walks away from the life he has been brought up to lead.

His first stop is the Fiji islands where he attempts to emulate the other backpackers and live life in the moment, but ignorant of how to go about this, he heads to New Zealand and becomes a beekeeper's apprentice. Here he takes up with a British girl from a background as limited in its way as his own who sets out to teach him the art of rough and ready travel.

There follows an intimate chronicle of the next thirteen months as the pair hike and hitch through some of the most remote areas of New Zealand and Australia, coming to know each other better than they have anyone else in their brief lives. As they wind their way through the Indonesian archipelago, however, it becomes clear that their idyll cannot last.

Alternating between narrative sections describing the couple's exotic experiences along their way and excurses into topics ranging from the origins of the cardboard box to the allure of Indonesian shadow theater, this unusual book is at once a memoir of youthful love and a chronicle of travel on the edge in the era before the internet.

In Search of the Blue Duck by James Bloom was published on 30 June 2021 by Dogberry Books. 

As part of this #RandomThingsTours blog tour, I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today. 

Extract from In Search of the Blue Duck

Departure

These events occurred more than a third of a century ago, a minimum of a dozen more years than he was old at that time. Given that the cells of a human body are all replaced every seven to ten years, depending upon which sources you consult, he has been a different person three to five times over since then, so whether he may any longer say that these things truly happened to him then, rather than merely occurring to me now, can and should be called into question.

The story begins ordinarily enough in midsummer in the mid­ eighties, with an image of him in the khaki worsted suit he still puts on once a year for a school graduation or a summer wedding, only with the waist let out an inch for each of the cellular iterations heretofore mentioned. He is lunching alone, seated on the wall of a fountain in the white travertine plaza of a famous Lower Manhattan office building, eating first rate falafel from a stand run by a genial Palestinian, who occasionally tells him disturbing stories which confirm his suspicion that he was lied to at Hebrew school about the admirable origins of the Jewish Homeland. He feels elated, not only because the day is fine and he is twenty­ two years old, but also because he has in the inside pocket of his jacket what he thinks of as his ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card. This is peculiar in that the jail is an invest­ment bank where he works as a trainee bond analyst, a job for which someone like him would never be given the briefest consideration today. The card is a round the­ world air ticket that cost him two weeks’ salary, which though modest by current standards in that egregious economic sector, is more than he will earn again until the next and present century.

The trainees in the bond division who are seen as being ‘hungry’, which translates to worthy of being there, are in the much larger corporate program. He has been assigned to the municipal or ‘muni’ department because he is viewed as being where he is thanks solely to nepotism. This is entirely correct since it was his mother who got him the job through the husband of one of her close friends, a person in front of whose name he was expected to place the word 'Uncle' when he was growing up, even though he hardly knew the man, who appeared to cringe at the spurious usage himself. His mother has a tendency to remind him of the enormous favor she has done him in securing this sinecure for him. Every time she does so, he is sorely tempted to tell her that she did it so that she could boast disingenuously to acquaintances about the promising job he landed straight out of college. Of course, she also did it in the hope that he might go on to get rich enough that she could continue to enjoy the satisfaction of being able to brag thus for the rest of her life, or his, whichever ends first. In order to lessen her embarrassment and disappointment, when her grand plan falls through, he has booked his departure for a couple of days after the surprise fiftieth birthday party his stepfather is planning for her at a fancy restaurant in Midtown.

Although he has been in ‘the program’ for only two months, he has already acquired a nickname by which he is known to all the other young male employees in bond analytics— Zero. Trainees are given topics to research and present and his was ‘Price Volatility of Long Term Zeros’. Zeros are bonds which do not carry the usual coupons that provide the buyer with semi­annual interest payments. Instead, all the interest is received at the end of the bond’s term, in return for which it is sold at a price heavily discounted from its maturity value. That these bonds yield nothing until the end of their term leads their value to fluctuate more than coupon bearing bonds, an attribute which can be exploited to the benefit of some investors and hence to the detriment of others. In an effort to make his presentation more interesting, he has spent long hours in the

Mid­Manhattan Library finding and printing off microfilm and fiche images of various public works projects for which zero type muni­bonds had been issued from the New Deal through the 1970s. Black and white pictures of huge concrete dams and vast suspension bridges in far flung states, both completed and under construction, and of the workers who built them, riveting and welding, wielding pickaxes and shovels, operating giraffe­ like cranes and hippopotamus­ like steamrollers. These efforts signally fail to impress the head of his department who repeatedly holds his forehead in despair at this irrelevant idiocy, while our Zero­hero, displays the lengthy sequence of seventeen by twenty ­two inch cards to which he has affixed his historic images, along with charts and graphs of illustrative bond price fluctuations during the mid­20th century, all painstakingly created by hand with steel rulers, plastic french curves and marker pens in that graphically primitive era.

Nudey Beach by Angie Annetts #Giveaway #Prize #Win #Competition

 

ONE HOT SUMMER. THE SHADOW OF AN EX.

Amber Stone discovers the sights and pleasures of a nearby naturist beach after leaving her abusive boyfriend, Clarke, and booking into a caravan site for six weeks. As she gets into a routine of working on her dreadful chick lit novel, despairing at neighbours, boozy nights out and getting naked on the beach, Clarke sends her messages, varying between vile and begging forgiveness. 

As the summer unfolds and things get hotter, Amber's fledgling relationship with a local artist begins to develop.

Yet there is always the shadow of Amber's return to her flat - which Clarke is supposed to be leaving...

But when his messages abruptly stop, it leaves Amber to wonder if any potential danger was all in her mind? 

Set amidst a summer of sunshine and darkness, NUDEY BEACH combines humour, threat, carnal pleasure and tenderness, and follows one woman's attempt at rediscovery and freedom. 

Contains mature themes throughout.

Nudey Beach by Angie Annetts was published in May 2020.

The author has very generously offered one print copy as a prize for Random Things readers today. 

Entry is simple, just fill out the competition widget in this blog post. UK Entries only please. 

GOOD LUCK! 

One copy of Nudey Beach by Angie Annetts

Angie is an East Londoner living in East Devon. 

Nudey Beach is her debut novel.

For more information please visit www.angieannetts.com

Instagram @highpriestessofdispensing

The Little Book Door by Francesca Catlow #Giveaway #CatlowInCorfu @FrancescaCatlow #Prize #Win #Competition

 

In the post-pandemic world Melodie feels lost and alone, desperate to find something to remind her of her previous life. She sets out on a trip to Corfu to reconnect with happier times, only to be haunted by memories and events from the past.

While travelling Melodie meets an intriguing and handsome man who has the potential to change her future. However, will the young girl from the plane with piercing green eyes be the one to open the door to Melodie's fate?

The Little Blue Door by Francesca Catlow was published on 28 June by Silverwood Books. 

I'm delighted to have a special giveaway on Random Things today. The author has generously offered a copy of The Little Blue Door, along with a traditional wine glass from Corfu and a book mark as a prize.

Entry is simple, just fill out the competition widget in this blog post. UK entries only please

GOOD LUCK! 

The Little Blue Door by Francesca Catlow Giveaway

Francesca Catlow loves travel. Born and brought up in the heart of Suffolk, Catlow has travelled
extensively in Europe with her French husband and, more recently, their two young children. Of all the places she’s been it is the Greek islands that have captured her heart. She visits as often as family commitments allow.

The Little Blue Door is Catlow’s first novel – written during the lockdown of 2020 while feeding her baby in the early hours. She has previously written plays alongside being a lyricist and performer.

This book is the first in a series.

To stay up to date go to www.FrancescaCatlow.co.uk or Facebook  Instagram  

and Twitter