Special Deal news

 

March 21st - traditionally the first day of Spring, and this year, a boost for my novel, too. The Kindle edition of 300 Days of Sun is an Amazon Daily Deal in the UK for one day only at a great price drop. You can check the Amazon page on the day for the deal, but it's a fantastic chance to pick up a bargain for your e-reader. 

 

This novel was selected as one of the Great Group Reads for National Reading Group Month in the USA last October, and has done well in Portuguese translation, too.

 

I've had some lovely reviews on Goodreads recently, so if you hop over there you can get a feel for the book. Here are some of my favourite ones:

 

"More of a mystery than I was anticipating but not in a bad way! Captivating at times with good plot twist."

 

"The writing itself is wonderful, the descriptions of Portugal are absolutely mind blowing, more than once I looked online to see just how close to reality they were and was not disappointed, the reader really is transported to Portugal whilst reading this, sadly once you close the book you are back at home.
  The characters were interesting and well developed, their predicaments compelling and really captured my attention. An impressive historical fiction novel with mystery, suspense, romance and wonderfully descriptive settings."

"I wish more fiction readers knew about Deborah Lawrenson, she really is a great novelist. Her books always have great detail of place and time, revealing the amount of research Lawrenson must do. I enjoyed this one for various reasons: a unique locale (Portugal), a believable &relatable narrator, WWII historical fiction backstory woven into contemporary tale, true crime suspense, and an interesting ending. Jo's story and Alva's story were both so compelling, I didn't want to put the book down!"

 

If you are intrigued about 300 Days of Sun and can't wait for March 21st, you can find it wherever you are via this Amazon link.

 

The sound of gunfire, Lisbon 1940

Come inside...a short glimpse inside 300 Days of Sun. I always enjoy reading and researching into a fascinating subject, and with this novel I loved writing the sections of the novel set in wartime Lisbon. Here's one of the early scene-setters, viewed through the eyes of Alva Barton, wife of an American newspaperman. The Bartons have left Rome, then Paris as the German army of occupation swept into France in 1940. After a nerve-jangling journey south, they have arrived in Portugal's capital city, along with many other refugees desperate to escape Europe.

The attic room at the Hotel Métropole was stuffy and a long way from the bathroom. But the Bartons were used to being thrown back on their own resources. Wasn’t that how they had ended up here? They were still the people they were before they lay on these hard twin beds, getting up each morning to eat salty toasted cheese sandwiches for breakfast and lobsters and langoustines for lunch, considered not extravagant but very standard local fare. Scrupulous cleanliness was the norm and they were treated with warmth and cordiality by the Portuguese at the hotel, in the cafés, in the shops.

Like Rome, Lisbon was a city on seven hills. After it was destroyed by the great earthquake of 1755, the architecture that rose from the ruins was bold and uniform in style, the best the eighteenth century could offer. Set back from the Tagus waterfront behind a wide square with a horseman statue was a triumphal arch with colonnaded building forming wings to either side, reminiscent of the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. In its way, the city was as self-confident and beguiling as Paris. It even had its Champs Elysée: the magnificent tree-lined Avenida de la Liberdade.

On display in the stores of the Rua Augusta was an abundance of goods and food, much of it imported: McVitie’s biscuits from England, Haig whisky from Scotland, German stollen cakes made with marzipan. Newspapers with all the familiar titles, the Daily Mail from London, the Herald and France Soir from Paris, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, squashed together into the racks in similar proportion to the displaced persons in the cafés. The British Embassy was next to the building that housed the German Legation, which left the Union Jack fluttering with authority only a few hundred yards from the Nazi swastika.

At night, Lisbon possessed a rare beauty. Light danced from shops and houses; churches and palaces were floodlit like stage sets. The streets were full with a sense of happiness until three in the morning. The clubs oozed American dance music. It was all too possible to mistake it for a safe haven, a place of excitement and adventure. When they heard gunfire as they walked through a side street, on the second night, they cowered against a wall but no advance troops appeared. The next day they were told that what they had most likely heard was the beating of carpets. A local law forbade the practice between the hours of nine a.m. and midnight, so those householders who abhorred early rising beat their carpets in the party hours.

300 Days of Sun is available through all good bookshops and on Amazon - link here.

From HarperCollins US catalog: "Deborah Lawrenson’s mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy past—where two women, decades apart, are drawn into a dark game of truth and lies that still haunts the shifting sea marshes.

Traveling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to escape an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But beneath the crumbling façade of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly, its economy compromised by corruption and wartime spoils. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a child’s kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.

Joanna’s subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into The Alliance, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro -- where the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger."

For a great review in Portugalist, the must-read travel site for Portugal, click here.

                                                

Sunset seascape

 

As soon as I saw this gorgeous picture, I recognised it as the scene in my mind when I wrote the opening of 300 Days of Sun. Taken, with no filter, by my friend Sara Barraud at Zambujeira do Mar in southern Portugal, it captures the other worldly light at a certain point in the evening when reality seems to recede. Sara is a garden designer by profession, and a brilliant nature photographer. If you are on Instagram you can find her stream here.

 

Here is the extract from the novel's prologue, when a mother stands transfixed:

 

A few careless minutes, and the boy was gone. 

    Violet shadows stretched from the rocks, clock hands over the sand. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to linger, but the sea and sky had merged into a shimmering mirror of copper and red; it was hard to tell if she was floating above the water, or standing on air. Waves beat time on the shore then reached out to caress her feet.

   She could hear the children shrieking with pleasure. A short distance away, the path threaded up through the rocks to the garden of pine trees and gold coin daisies: Horta das Rochas, the “garden of rocks” near the edge of the world, where famous explorers and navigators once set sail for unknown continents.

   Her eyes were still on the dissolving horizon when she called the children. A scampering on the wet sand brought a small hand to her leg. She glanced down.

   ‘Look!’ said the girl.

   Her daughter pointed to a flock of birds flying in silhouette against a blood-orange cloud. They watched for a moment.

   ‘Time to go back,’ she said.

   The boy, older by a year, spent hours by the rock pool, staring at the stirrings of sea life in miniature. It was no more than a few steps from where she was standing. ‘Tico!’ she called, using his baby name.

   No answer.

   The rock pool was deserted. 

    ‘Where’s Tico?’ 

    ‘Gone,’ said the girl.

    ‘He’s hiding! Come on.’ 

    She took the girl’s hand and they ran to the wind-carved cave. ‘Tico!’

    ‘Tico!’ echoed the girl.

    The opening in the rocks was in deep shadow, cold and dark. The girl clutched tighter. They both called again. No answer. They felt along the damp creased walls, for a warm, giggling mass balled up on the ground. The cave was empty. Outside the sunset deepened. They were alone on the beach.

    All the way up the path, they called to him. No answer.

 

A reminder to UK readers - if that has intrigued you, 300 Days of Sun is on promo for the next week or so only as a Kindle Monthly Deal for only 99p.

   

Algarve: This Shore is More

 

"Mykonos may be alluring, Ibiza tantalizing, and St Tropez may have the ultimate swagger, but the Algarve in Portugal is my port of call for dreamy, charming and authentic. And the light: at sunrise, it’s luminescent with shades of cotton candy and bluebells; at sunset, it dissolves listlessly into a canvas of tangerine and ink."    Scarlett Roitman

Isn't that a beautiful scene? I discovered Scarlett's blog through Instagram and was drawn immediately to her gorgeous descriptions of Faro and the coast, backdrop to many scenes in 300 Days of Sun.

The introduction to her post This Shore is More continues:

"I may not be a creature of habit, but when it comes to July and August, all roads seem to lead to the Algarve. I’ve been coming here for fifteen summers. My husband, Mark, and I loved it so much, we started developing properties here (and if you’re interested, visit www.thekeysatquinta.com). It’s a mere two and half hours from London, summer perfection is guaranteed (it averages 300 days of sunshine a year), and it truly has the most spectacular beaches in Europe. This is a canvas of whitewashed towns and villages, scented orange groves, rugged, russet coastline and biscuit-coloured sands."

 

You can carry on reading over on the Diary of a Londoness blog - and I strongly urge you to do so, for stunning pictures, some lovely writing and a glorious taste of the Algarve!

 

A sense of place



I never set out to write novels that were particularly known for their sense of place. I set out to write stories that rang true and that transported the reader into another place and time, drawn into authentic surroundings, experiencing what my characters were seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting.

 

As Simone de Beauvoir tells us in her autobiographical Force of Circumstance: “I do not mention the colour of the sky, the taste of a fruit, out of self-indulgence (…). Not only do [these details] allow us to apprehend a period and a person in flesh and blood, but by their non-significance they are the very touch of truth in a true story.”

 

This is the start of a guest post I wrote for Karen at My Reading Corner. If you'd like to read the rest, please hop over to her blog on this link. The photo above is of one of the lovely, yet abandoned buildings facing the marina in Faro in Portugal, setting for 300 Days of Sun.

 

Lisbon in wartime

 



During the Second World War, Lisbon must have been a fascinating yet frightening and desperate place. As Hitler’s occupation swept across Europe, neutral (or supposedly neutral) Portugal became one of the Continent’s last escape routes. In an iconic image that many will recall, Lisbon was the transit point for Bergman’s Ilsa when she was waved off by Bogart’s Rick in the classic movie Casablanca, made in 1942.

When Ilsa arrived, like Alva Barton in The Alliance - the novel within 300 Days of Sun - she would have found Lisbon a confusing city of dubious trades, conspiracy, and deception, and a hub of espionage. The Atlantic port was flooded with a million refugees, including Jews and Allied POWs who needed berths on passenger ships heading west. The American Export Lines shipping office was besieged. But there were also considerable numbers of foreigners coming to Lisbon with the intention of staying for various nefarious purposes—including large numbers of Nazi personnel.

However, despite the tensions, contemporary accounts of arriving in Portugal at that time by American and British writers describe a place of light and color and flowers, friendliness and generosity from the ordinary people—and profound normality after the horrors many had witnessed. The Portuguese welcomed the refugees with extraordinarily good grace.

In July 1940, the New York Times Lisbon correspondent Alva E. Gaymon wrote vivid accounts of the swelling international population in a city that still retained the lights and luxuries of pre-war Paris. In the same month, Lilian Mowrer, the wife of notable US foreign correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who had been based in Paris, wrote of the city: “Lisbon, the port of good hope, from which they could escape from the Germans by Clipper, or ocean liner, or freighter, or tramp ship—anything that would take them away from a Europe that was rapidly becoming a prison.”

 Yet despite the glittering harbour on the Tagus estuary, the superficial joviality of the Portuguese who opened their doors, the fisherwomen who walked barefoot carrying their baskets on their heads, the nightclubs where jazz bands played or fado singers captured a mournful mood, all felt the unease of living in an authoritarian regime. Salazar’s Estado Novo—the New State— was watched over by a Gestapo-like secret police and a censored press. If the locals also seemed to sway with the winds of war, favouring the side that seemed to be winning, and welcomed the hard currency these people brought, who would blame them?

Even before the United States joined the war, American nationals arrived in a steady stream to work with Lisbon’s embassies and news agencies, working closely with the British in many cases. It soon became obvious that not all these hundreds of new staff were engaged in normal diplomatic work. Military and naval attachés gathered as much information as they could. Press officers crowded in. Teams of expert coders and decoders worked on sending and receiving communications around the clock. False identities and spies were two a penny. In a show of strength, US battleships put in to harbour – their crews were said to be the happiest foreigners in Lisbon, as they were the only ones certain of a passage out. 

As the guns of war raged elsewhere, the Allies and the Nazis faced each other every day in the squares and streets, cafés and restaurants of Lisbon. Passenger planes flew in from New York: the famous Pan Am clipper service, a luxurious flying boat that landed on the Tagus river. Noel Coward, travelling on propaganda work, called the aircraft: “a well-appointed bus that had become somehow embedded in the sky”. Meanwhile, on nearby Portella airfield, black-painted converted Nazi bombers were bringing in passengers from Berlin alongside scheduled flights from London.
  

Lisbon, with its swirling sea mists and rumours, its mixture of grand architecture and twisting medieval streets, was a place of brittle glamor. Famous names passing through, helped on their way by well-wishers, or using their fame to promote the Allied cause, or in the process of making their names, included Antoine Saint-Exupéry, Marc Chagall, Arthur Koestler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond), Lord Mountbatten, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and scores of minor European royalty. Gone with the Wind star Leslie Howard was killed in 1943 when the airliner he was traveling in was shot down over the Bay of Biscay.

On the coast, the enemies sunbathed within earshot of each other and gambled together at the casino at Estoril, where the cream of European society, including royalty, was sitting out the war in sunshine and relative comfort. Across the roulette tables, under glittering chandeliers, as in the boulevards of Lisbon, Allied intelligence agents pitted their wits against the German Abwehr and Gestapo, each side trying to infiltrate and disrupt each other’s business by any means possible. Legendary secret agents like Garbo, real name Juan Pujol García, who played a double game for the British while apparently spying for the Nazis, made Lisbon their centre of operations.

For Hitler’s Germany had a pressing reason for sending agents to Portugal: the acquisition of the mineral tungsten. Tungsten, or wolfram, was a vital component in the manufacture of armour-piercing munitions, and the nearest deposits were mined in Portugal. The Nazis needed to cut deals with the Portuguese. But they were at an historic disadvantage, thanks to England’s status as Portugal’s oldest ally. These two countries had supported each other for 800 years and had the trade links to prove it, in port wine …and tungsten mining. Naturally, the Allies were equally determined to frustrate any Nazi bid for an element needed for arms manufacture. 

But the Portuguese, led by Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar were playing a dangerous game, walking the tightrope of neutrality. An intellectual economist, Salazar was known as “The Plainclothes Dictator” and had more in common ideologically with Hitler than with the Allies. The gold the Nazis offered in payment for tungsten was hard to resist for a poor country that was vulnerable to invasion either from Germany or Franco’s Spain – and Salazar did not resist taking it. Both sides put pressure on him, and made their deals, politically as well as economically. 

Even before the United States joined the war, Americans were involved in humanitarian organizations in Lisbon. An early presence was the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker endeavor working for peace and the relief of suffering. The Lisbon office director was Philip Conrad, and his assistant Howard Wriggins would go on to become a distinguished US diplomat and academic.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee – known to most in Lisbon simply as “The Joint” – worked tirelessly from the start, too. Its head was a rabbi with a doctorate from Yale, Joseph J Schwartz, who had been in Europe when the war began. He set up headquarters in the city in June 1940 and set about finding food and shelter for the desperate and displaced in the first instance, and paperwork and transport across the Atlantic in the second.

In October 1942, a group of thirty American women, all officially involved in child welfare, arrived in Lisbon on a Portuguese liner with the purpose of escorting one thousand French children to America and safety in the care of temporary foster families. But the invasion of North Africa and the occupation of the former free zone of the South of France meant that the children’s escape route was blocked. In a further tragedy, one of the women, Hazel Helen Mackay, of the Children’s Welfare Foundation in New York, disappeared from the dangerous sea cliff of Boca do Inferno – the Mouth of Hell – near Cascais. Only her shoes and handbag remained.

On the offensive, newspaper reporters from all countries were engaged in a ruthless game of black propaganda as well as information gathering. Disinformation games began, with British newspapers made up for sale in Lisbon carrying stories that would unsettle the Nazis and feed false leads.

Voice of America and the popular radio commentator Elmer Davis entered the fray in June 1942. Hollywood led the way in challenging for hearts and minds in more subtle ways by providing many of the movies that played in the cinemas.

Journalist Marya Mannes was a later arrival. She had been an editor for Vogue magazine in her native New York before moving to Italy in the 1930s with her husband. In the teeth of war, the couple had returned to the United States. He was soon a navy pilot and she used her editorial skills to gather information about the situation across Europe from the refugees who had made it across the Atlantic. From this, she moved into intelligence work, being trained as a spy for the Secret Intelligence Branch of the OSS.

She was sent to the Lisbon station just before the D-Day landings in June 1944. Her cover was that she was working as a reporter for The New Yorker, and indeed she did produce several Letters from Lisbon, but her brief was to mingle in the city, keeping alert for any promising information and swapping gossip with the other foreign correspondents. So credible was she simply as a glamorous magazine writer – she was tall, blonde and beautiful – that she would even tell men who asked what she was doing in Portugal, “I’m an international spy, of course!”

Eventually, as the war swung in favor of the Allies, the most crucial deal was negotiated by Churchill and the old ally England: the use of the Portuguese islands in the mid-Atlantic, the Azores, as a forward base for the United States Air Force. Portugal emerged one of the winners after the war, too. Salazar’s shrewd trade in wolfram saw the country’s balance of trade deficit go from $40 million in the red in 1939 to a $68 million surplus in 1944. A significant amount of that can be accounted for by payment from the German Reichsbank to the Banco do Portugal of 124 tons of Nazi gold. 

* The photo at the top of the page comes from my Instagram review of Ronald Weber's excellent book, The Lisbon Route.

A book by its cover

Cover art for books is a subject that fascinates readers, reviewers and authors alike. Getting the cover right is crucial to a book's retail success - and keeping author and readers happy. I couldn't be more delighted with the cover for 300 Days of Sun designed by Jarrod Taylor. It offers an alluring first impression that is entirely relevant to the story and it's attractive in the full sense of the word: it draws you into the setting of the story, the dramatic rocky coast of the Algarve in Portugal. Brightness, beauty and danger are implicit in the image, as is the hint of a scratched old book.

 

But how did this cover evolve from an initial idea? To celebrate publication day in the USA and Canada, I've been given permission to show the process behind the scenes as discussion progressed between editor and author, design team and sales and marketing at HarperCollins.

 

I had just arrived in France last summer when the first images came through in an email from my editor, Jennifer Barth. Which did I prefer of these two?

 

 

 

I thought about it for a few hours, and wrote back to say I liked the red one best. It was the way the letters seemed to be sinking (or rising) behind the layers of the city that appealed. As it turned out, I was in a minority, and most votes went to the second design, by Gregg Kulick. I can understand why. The image is a strong one, with a great sense of light and dark. Perhaps it was the lettering that put me off. 

 

The next stage was another email containing another four images, all by Jarrod Taylor. Which did I like best? Which would you choose?

 

 

 

 

 

I liked them all except the third one, because the yellow rock seemed to hint strangely at an Egyptian pyramid. Our first guests of the summer had arrived, and we had a group reaction to report back. Most popular were the second and the fourth (though the lettering seemed wrong on that one).

 

The team in New York played around with the second for a while, using a deeper blue and capital letters (gorgeous, rather unusual, colours for cover art - and I preferred the original):

 

 

Then the fourth was re-worked and presented to a marketing and sales meeting. Everyone agreed, including me, over in France, that we had found our ideal cover:

 

 

So there we have it. Do you agree, or would you have made a different choice? As far as I'm concerned, as soon as I saw this last version, I felt it was right, almost like a sigh of relief.

 

As the book finally goes on sale, huge thanks to everyone at Harper, especially Jarrod Taylor and Gregg Kulick, Jennifer Barth, Amy Baker, Katherine Beitner, Jonathan Burnham, Cal Morgan, Kathryn Ratcliffe-Lee, Mary Sasso, Sherry Wasserman and Erin Wicks. Also to Stephanie Cabot, as ever. 

 

"a deeply satisfying novel, a rich story with a strong feeling for time and place and the expert pacing of the best thrillers. Readers will appreciate Lawrenson’s ability to combine stunning atmosphere with a fascinating historical backstory."

                                                     — starred Booklist review

The seeds of a novel

 

                        
A question I'm asked surprisingly often is, "Where do you get the ideas for your novels?" As someone who is always noticing things and wondering whether these would make a story, I always feel it's more a question of, "How do you decide which idea would make the best story?"

 

The seeds of 300 Days of Sun were sown when I traveled to Faro with my daughter Maddy, who had booked herself a two-week Portuguese language course there. She was only seventeen at the time and I felt I couldn’t allow her to go alone, though she would have done so, quite happily. While she went to class every morning, I wandered around the town with a street map, camera and my notebook. 

I am always inspired to write by the places I visit, and Faro was no exception. I had never been there before, though I knew the name from a hundred airport departure boards, as the hub for tourists traveling to the Algarve coast. Maddy and I were charmed from the first evening, by its mosaic pavements, by the laid-back atmosphere in the August heat, by the sea and the glimpses of green salt marsh. In the afternoons, we found various ways to get to the beaches and islands – and the first time we went to Praia de Faro, we did find the sea curiously green and furry, though this is not the usual state of affairs.

 

It’s important to say here that, for all the geographical accuracy of my portrayal of Faro, the town in this book is an imaginary version: certain elements, like great storm of February 1941 and the re-opening of the Café Alianҫa during the local elections (held, in real life, in 2013), are superficially true, but the story in the book is entirely fictional. If there are similarities with real life on the Algarve, this is only in order to give my story the tang of authenticity, though as ever, I have tried to describe the places as I found them, to transport the reader to an atmospheric and intriguing place.

It has been a long time coming, but a big thank you is due to the Portuguese Tourist Board in London. In June 1985, I was lucky enough to be invited on a press trip to Lisbon, Cascais and Estoril. I was a trainee reporter on the Kentish Times, a weekly newspaper based in South London. The trip was an adventure that began with a gathering of six or seven strangers in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport; we were to be escorted by a Portuguese guide with a twinkly smile called João and, in return for writing an article extolling the beauty of this area of Portugal’s Atlantic coast, we would be treated to a week of interesting trips and lovely meals.

 

We had a wonderful time. Everyone seemed to get along, and there was lots of laughter, including a running joke about sardines, though the details of that one have got away. We visited Setúbal, Óbidos, Belém and Sintra, and the pousadas, the medieval castles and convents that had been transformed into atmospheric hotels. We had dinner one evening at the Fortaleza do Guincho at Cascais, where we drank white port with ice as an aperitif. Here I am, in a collage of old photos (I loved those pink shoes).

 

Unfortunately, when I got back to England and wrote my piece, only four sparse, dull paragraphs made it into print with no photograph. I was so embarrassed that I never went to the trip reunion in London a few months later, not daring to face João again. So if anyone at the Portuguese Tourist Board should find themselves reading this book, may I say Obrigado and apologize for making you wait so long for some words that do Lisbon and Cascais justice.

 

 

Stork in flight

 

First new blog post for ages, I know, but I wanted to leave the Goodreads giveaway up as the first one on the page, and it ran for almost the whole of January. I've been busy too, trying to get a new book off the ground as well as all the real-life matters that don't seem to stop just because I'd like to sit down and write. As far as the blog is concerned, I think I'm going to do what I did in the lead-in to publication of The Lantern, all those years ago when I started this blog. That is, post little and often, with glimpses into the background of the upcoming novel due out in April.

 

So here we are, in this picture, on the salt marches in the sea at Faro, on the Algarve coast of Portugal. The landscape is home to thousands of storks that make their nests anywhere you care to look up in the town, in the recesses of church windows and roofs, on the pediment of the Old Town gates. If you look carefully, there's a stork in flight in the top left of the photo, cropped as much as I can without losing too much focus.

The first evening I was here, I started to notice how most of the streetlamps were tufted with dried grasses and twigs. Then I saw more ragged wigs on church porches and high ledges. I assumed it was yet more evidence of neglect, that weeds had seeded and been left to grow in sandy crevices, but as I began to study them more carefully, I figured it out. They were birds’ nests. There was one high on the stone pediment of the gatehouse to the Old Town, a great wheel of grasses, big as a tractor tyre. I looked up as I passed. I was lucky. I caught a movement inside the wheel, then a powerful white wing extended and then folded in on itself.

 

                                                                    from 300 Days of Sun

 

PS. Hmm, now I've had another look at the picture, I'm wondering whether it actually is a stork! This one definitely is, pictured from a ferry boat making its way through the maze of marshy islands. Apologies to any expert ornithologists!

 

 

Dreaming of sun

 

Weeks have passed and I have been quietly working away at my desk, trying to get another novel off the ground. I can't say much about it yet, as it's such early days and so much can change, but the act of writing brings home, once again, how much I enjoy working under gloomy skies and rain, while the pictures in my head become more intensely vibrant.

 

Just like these images from Portugal that capture the setting for my new novel, 300 Days of Sun (out next April). So relax and scroll down, and see if you can imagine yourself there, feeling the heat of the sun and the salt water on your skin...while winter does its worst outside your window.

 

As these are not my photos, I have included the links to the articles and travel websites they came from. The top image is from the London Daily Telegraph, and comes with a great introduction to the Algarve coast:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destination/portugal/93544/Algarve-travel-guide.html

 

 

This is the same view, but taken in bright daylight. I want to swim in that emerald green part of the water! http://www.globusjourneys.com/tour/portugal-in-depth/zp/

 

 

https://www.mightydeals.co.uk/Getaways/Overseas/National/Eden-Resort-Albufeira-Algarve-Portugal-7-Nights-January/4236

 

 

http://www.thomson.co.uk/destinations/europe/portugal/algarve/holidays-algarve.html

 

 

 

http://www.villas.fr/location-villa-algarve-portugal/reg28.html

 

 

 

http://www.cheapholidays.com/destinations/portugal/algarve

Be one of the first to read!

 

Faro, Portugal, setting for the opening of my forthcoming novel, 300 Days of Sun. Over on my facebook page, HarperCollins US are offering the chance for three readers to win an very early copy of the book, in bound galley proof. If you're on facebook, please do check it out. The book is going to look beautiful and here are some photos to set the scene and a taster of what's inside, from (almost) the start:

I met Nathan Emberlin in Faro, southern Portugal, in August 2014.

At first, I thought he was just another adventurous young man, engaging but slightly immature. His beautiful sculpted face held a hint of vulnerability, but that ready smile and exuberant cheekiness eased his way, as did the radiant generosity of his spirit, so that it wasn’t only women who smiled back; people of all ages warmed to Nathan, even the cross old man who guarded the stork’s nest on the lamppost outside the tobacconist’s shop.

Yes, he appeared from nowhere – but then, so did we all. I didn’t go to Faro to get a story. That summer, I was on the run, or so it felt; I was trying to consign an awkward episode to my own past, not to get entangled in someone else’s. Besides, a lot of people I met in Faro were in the process of change, of expanding their horizons and aiming for a better life. The town was full of strangers and constant movement: planes overhead, roaring in and out of the airport across the shore; boats puttering in and out of the harbour; trains sliding between the road and the sea; buses and cars; pedestrians bobbing up and down over the undulating cobblestones.

 

 

The café, at least, was still. On the way to the language school, it had the presence and quiet grace of an ancient oak, rooted to its spot in the Rua Dr Francisco Gomes. The columns and balustrades of its once-grand fin-de-siècle façade had an air of forgotten romance that was hard to resist. I pushed against its old-style revolving door that first morning simply because I was curious to see inside.

 

I went up to the main counter, into an aromatic cloud of strong coffee, where a group of men knotted over an open newspaper. The barman, wiping his hands on an apron that was none too clean, seemed to be engaged in voicing his opinion and was in no hurry to serve me.

Photographs of old Faro were set into wooden panelling: black and white scenes of a fishing community, of empty roads and dusty churches. The argument at the bar counter intensified, or that’s what it sounded like. It’s not always possible to tell in a foreign language. It might just be excitability. But some words were easy to understand. Contra a natureza. Anorma. Devastador.
 

 

So, if you'd like to be one of the first to read on, there's still time to get your name in the draw. Good luck - and I'd love to know what you think. The publisher's catalog copy is here, and we've had the first blurb from the lovely and very generous Erika Robuck, author of the fab Hemingway's Girl and The House of Hawthorne among other seriously good reads:

 

"With its lush settings, high-stakes suspense, and novel-within-a-novel, 300 DAYS OF SUN delivers a labyrinth of complex relationships the reader is both breathless to solve and eager to return to upon completion. I lost sleep reading this fabulous, haunting novel."

 

Cover reveal: 300 Days of Sun

Ta-da...isn't it glorious? I am very happy indeed. The picture shows the dramatic rocks on the Algarve coast in southern Portugal, where the novel is set - and I hope it makes you want to plunge into the book as well as that sea.

The scratchy, scuffed effect and the lettering reminiscent of the 1950s is perfectly in tune with the story, too. Central to the action is a book published in 1954, written by a young American woman married to a foreign correspondent, based on her experience of wartime Lisbon, her travels in the south, and the aftermath of a time when the Allies and the Nazis faced each other across the casino tables and restaurants of supposedly neutral Portugal.

It's a story about borders and the transforming effects of crossing them, either willingly or unwillingly; the way altered geography and shifts of power change our lives. As I wrote, the story took on a thriller-ish feel, which made it exciting to write. Above all, there's a strong sense of place and atmosphere, with an evocation of a dangerous yet fascinating era.

Before publication - which is not until April 2016 - I will post up the start and various extracts, but for now I will leave you with the HarperCollins catalogue introduction. Fingers crossed it leaves you enticed.

Combining the atmosphere of Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins with the intriguing historical backstory of Christina Baker Kline’s The Orphan Train, Deborah Lawrenson’s mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy past—where two women, decades apart, are drawn into a dark game of truth and lies that still haunts the shifting sea marshes.

Traveling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to escape an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But beneath the crumbling façade of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a child’s kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.

Joanna’s subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into The Alliance, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro -- where the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger. 

Amazon:  http://bit.ly/1JZun00 

Barnes & Noble:  http://bit.ly/1VQotDY 

Books-a-Million:  http://bit.ly/1FzRudB 

iBooks: http://apple.co/1FzRytU 

Indiebound:  http://bit.ly/1O3YWWj

Light at the end of the tunnel

 

Phew. I made the deadline and delivered the first draft of my new novel this week. I have no idea how good, or bad, it is. That's not false modesty, or disingenuousness; I genuinely don't know. Before I send it, I always print out the first draft because hard copy reads differently from the words on the screen. I don't know why that should be, but that's how it seems to me. No matter how many times I go over and over the text on screen - and I am a constant self-editor - I want to see it in the cold, hard light of day.

 

So I print out, only single-spaced so it looks more like a finished page in a book, rather than the double-spaced manuscript that publishers and agents want to see. Then I edit again on paper, as the world's most critical reader.

 

As such, I find some parts are better than I expected - and some are far worse. It's much easier to judge the pace and the amount of attention given to various aspects of the story when it's on paper. It may be different for other people, but this is how it is for me. I thought I had wrapped up the ending quite well, but last Sunday I ended up not doing a light polish of the text as I'd hoped, but writing 2,300 additional words to expand what now seemed rushed.

 

At this stage the book has taken over all rational thought. I consider the mundane necessities of life like going to the supermarket to be outrageous intrusions. I resent leaving my desk to answer the door or the telephone. All I can think about are the loose ends: the tiny plot and character issues that need to be tied up, the small mentions that ought to be recalled for proper satisfaction. I scribble these down on bits of ripped paper, newspaper, anything and put them in a pocket for decoding later.

 

At the end of this process, I make the changes on screen. It still seems extraordinary to be able to fit an entire book in a computer document, attach to an email and press send. It took me a whole day to print out my first novel, put it in the box the computer paper had come in, parcel up and take it to the post office!

 

So now I wait. (That part hasn't changed.) My editor in New York told me immediately that she is immersed in another project for the next few weeks, so not to expect a response for a while. I couldn't be happier. That's a fortnight's relaxation and decompression at least. As regular readers know, I have had a tough time to write through but now the pressure has lifted. It feels like a long time since the story began with a new place to explore and random observations in a notebook.

Faro notebook

Back from Portugal and looking through the notes made and photos taken in Faro. Will any of the material eventually transform into part of a published novel? At this stage, I have no idea. The ideas I have are vague and constantly shifting. The only way to find out if they work will be to sit down, start writing and see what happens.

When I'm in a place, I like to engage with the details that I might not remember when I sit down at the desk to write. Surprisingly often, the pursuit of these details leads seamlessly to the bigger picture - the geography, the atmosphere, conversations with the locals. Take the gate to the Old Town, for example, just visible in the picture below at the far end of the Jardim Manuel Bivar.

After a few days wandering around the town looking up at the pretty Moorish-inspired buildings, I started to see dried grass hanging below streetlamps and rooflines. On closer inspection, these were birds' nests. Then I started to see wheels of grasses and twigs on churches - they were everywhere, including on the pediment of the Old Town gate (below). One evening, there was a flutter of white wings inside.

 

But which birds were making them? As an ex-journalist, I'm not shy of asking when I want to know something, rather to my daughter's embarrassment on occasion. ("Mum! Did you have to ask the hottest waiter what that music was?!" "Yes. And did he not bring me over a written note of the CD title? That's the way to do it.")

 

So I asked a cosmopolitan-looking local (many Portuguese speak excellent English) and was told they were storks. We chatted for a while under the gate and I found out that it's illegal to remove the nests as storks mate for life and only build one nest. They sleep there each night, bedding down at sunset, and the storks have always been in Faro as it's so close to their food supplies on the salt marshes of the Ria Formosa, now a natural park between the coast and the barrage islands fronting the Atlantic. 



Another story in the details that was hard to miss was the economic woe of Portugal, an issue they share with several other southern countries of the European Union. As someone who loves Europe and its people but not the EU political construct and the dead hand of its bureaucracy, I noted the evidence of closed businesses and decaying houses for sale with sinking heart.

 

I've never seen such pretty cobbled pedestrian streets, though; lining them, shops selling very cheap fashion items - clothes a third or a quarter of the price of similar items in the South of France - and great bags for around ten euros. (Naturally, we did what we could to help out economically...)

 

Faro beach was a half hour bus or ferry ride away. This is a view from the ferry, which was our preferred option. On the salt flats were tiny fishermen's huts, and constant fishing activity, whether from small rowing boats or the backbreaking work of clam digging.

  

 

Finally, a snap taken on Farol, part of one of the barrage islands, sandy spits of land that are constantly being pulled and reshaped by the strength of the Atlantic Ocean along the southernmost points of continental Portugal. The beaches are superb, the water clear and cold. And just look at that sky.