The Art of Falling: giveaway

 

 

With twelve days to go until publication of 300 Days of Sun, there's a chance over on Facebook to win a signed copy of one of my earlier novels, The Art of Falling, that wasn't published in the USA.

 

The Art of Falling is the story of Isabel's search for her missing father Tom, many years after he disappeared. Her story is interwoven with his experiences in Italy beginning in World War Two. On one level, it's a detective story, but it is also a sensuous evocation of love and landscape, loss and regeneration, war and its aftermath. While I was writing the book, the engineering work to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa was being undertaken, and it became a central theme of the story, standing for the way we all have to learn to live with flaws, and how security can be contained in imperfection.

A review in Book and Magazine Collector said: "Fact fuses with fiction as the delicately lyrical writing draws you on to discover the truth behind the disappearance of the main character's father. The Art of Falling manages to be a literary novel without being pretentious, and as such has appeal to a wide audience."

If you'd like a chance to win, hop over to my author Facebook page and say hello in the comments there. 

The Sea Garden: blurb

Thank you all so much for your fantastic reactions to the US cover! There are more over on the facebook page, and your thoughts really mean a lot. So what's inside the cover? This is the HarperCollins blurb, the long version for the catalog - note spelling! - and pre-publication sites. No doubt some of it will appear on the back cover, too.

 

I've made a couple of photo montages to help set the scenes. Let me know what you think...

 

Romance, suspense, and World War II mystery are woven together in three artfully linked novellas-rich in drama and steeped in atmosphere-from the critically acclaimed author of The Lantern

 

THE SEA GARDEN
On the lush Mediterranean island of Porquerolles off the French coast, Ellie Brooke, an award-winning British landscape designer, has been hired to restore a memorial garden. Unsettled by its haunted air and the bitterness of the garden's owner, an elderly woman who seems intent on undermining her, Ellie finds that her only ally on the island is an elusive war historian …

THE LAVENDER FIELD
Near the end of World War II, Marthe Lincel, a young blind woman newly apprenticed at a perfume factory in Nazi-occupied Provence, finds herself at the center of a Resistance cell. When tragedy strikes, she faces the most difficult choice of her life . . . and discovers a breathtaking courage she never expected.

A SHADOW LIFE
Iris Nightingale, a junior British intelligence officer in wartime London, falls for a French agent. But after a secret landing in Provence results in terrible Nazi reprisals, he vanishes. When France is liberated, Iris is determined to uncover the truth. Was he the man he claimed to be?

Ingeniously interconnected, this spellbinding triptych weaves three parallel narratives into one unique tale of love, mystery, and murder. The Sea Garden is a vivid and absorbing chronicle of love and loss in the fog of war-and a penetrating and perceptive examination of the impulses and circumstances that shape our lives.