Monthly Archives: April 2023

Location, Location, Location with Angela Petch.

28/04/2023Guest Post, Location!, Writing & ReadingAngela Petch, Bookouture, Carol Thomas, Carol Thomas Author, Carol Thomas Author Blog, HistFic, Historical Fiction, Italy, The Girl Who Escaped, WWII, WWII Fictioncarol

It is always a pleasure to have my lovely writing friend Angela Petch as a guest on my blog, so I couldn’t resist inviting her along to talk about the setting of her latest novel, The Girl Who Escaped. Over to you, Angela …

All my novels, bar one, are set in Italy. I love this beautiful country and am fortunate to live in eastern Tuscany for six months each summer. The setting is very important in all my stories and the way my characters interact with their locations is a way of delving into their personalities and anchoring them to a backdrop. “Everybody has to be somewhere,” said Spike Milligan.

I think it’s better to drop details in little by little rather than describing at length: as if the reader is noticing aspects of the setting from the corner of his or her eye.

Panorama of Urbino.

My latest book, The Girl who Escaped, is set mainly in Urbino, a compact Renaissance city in Le Marche region. I know it quite well because my Italian mother-in-law is from Urbino and I married in a tiny hamlet just outside the city.

Revisiting the hamlet of Castel Cavallino, where we married.

Nevertheless, I still felt the need to walk about with my notebook and camera to record details.

Writing beneath the twin towers of Urbino’s palace.

The young heroine in my new book is Jewish and about to be sent away from her beloved birthplace to a camp. She has already suffered under Mussolini’s racial laws and denied her university place to study medicine. How to describe the places she will miss?

This is an excerpt from Chapter Six, when Devora is struggling to look after her twin brothers on her own, as her parents have been sent to an internment camp. Their children were born in Italy and so are exempt – at this moment – from being sent away, not being deemed “foreign Jews”.

“She was alone up at the Fortezza, the wind keener than in the city centre, cold air nipping at her cheeks. The clouds over the mountains were heavy with more snow, not unusual in the spring, and she swung her arms back and forth across her chest to warm her body. And then she threw her head back and screamed, howling at the sky like a wild animal, no longer able to contain her anger and frustration. On the rise opposite, the twin towers that had always seemed to her like an illustration from a book of fairy tales now looked menacing: portals to Hell, holding bands of evil, fascist warriors bent on destroying the hopes and dreams of her family: first her father’s livelihood, next her brothers’ schooling, her own medical studies and social life all snatched away simply because they were considered different and undesirable. ‘Idioti, all of you,’ she screamed over and over, her words snatched by the cold breeze.”

While my husband’s grandparents were alive, we stayed with them in Urbino but last year, we rented a small apartment in the old quarter and I spent hours tramping about the city to soak in the atmosphere. We met the caretaker of the synagogue and she invited us back to her home and she shared more information about the war with us, which made its way into the book.

Me in her library. She is also a writer and was full of useful information.

If a writer can manage to visit the places they write about, it helps so much when painting the scenes. Visiting a location can help bring alive the imagination.

About The Girl Who Escaped:

Italy, 1940. The girl sobs and rages as her father tells her the terrible news. “Italy is entering the war alongside Germany. Jews are to be arrested and sent to camps. We have to be ready.”

As fascists march across the cobbled piazzas and past the towered buildings of her beloved home city, twenty-year-old Devora’s worst fears come true. Along with her Jewish parents and twin little brothers they are torn away from everything they love and sent to an internment camp huddled in the mountains. Her father promises this war will not last long…

When they are offered a miraculous chance of escape by her childhood friend Luigi, who risks everything to smuggle vital information into the camp, the family clambers under barbed wire and races for the border. But Devora is forced to make a devastating choice between saving a stranger’s life and joining her parents. As shots fire in the moonless night, the family is separated.

Haunted by the question of whether they are dead or alive, all Devora can do for their future is throw herself into helping Luigi in the Italian resistenza in the fight for liberty. But posing as a maid for a German commander to gather secret intelligence, Devora is sure she sees her friend one night, in a Nazi uniform…

Is Devora in more danger than ever? And will her family ever be reunited – or will the war tear them apart?

An absolutely devastating but ultimately uplifting historical novel about how love and hope can get us through the darkest times. Perfect for fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Rhys Bowen and Soraya M. Lane.

Purchase here.

Thank you so much for the wonderful insight, Angela. The Girl Who Escaped is my current read and I am greatly enjoying it. xxx

And, while not based in Italy, don’t forget Angela’s wonderful charity novel, Mavis and Dot. All proceeds from this novel go to vital research into Cancer.

About the author:

Published by Bookouture, Angela Petch is an award-winning writer of fiction – and the occasional poem.

Every summer, she moves to Tuscany for six months, where she and her husband own a renovated watermill which they let out. When not exploring their unspoilt corner of the Apennines, she disappears to her writing desk at the top of a converted stable. In her Italian handbag or hiking rucksack, she always makes sure to store a notebook and pen to jot down ideas.

The winter months are spent in Sussex, where most of her family live. When Angela’s not helping out with grandchildren, she catches up with writer friends.

Angela’s gripping WWII, Tuscan novels are published by Bookouture. While her novel, Mavis and Dot, was self-published and tells of the frolics and foibles of two best friends who live by the seaside. Angela also writes short stories published in Prima and People’s Friend.

You can discover more about Angela Petch and her writing here: Facebook | Twitter | website | Amazon | Apricot Plots

#WritingWednesday with Sally Jenkins: Emotional Baggage Drop.

26/04/2023Writing & Reading, Writing WednesdayCarol Thomas, Carol Thomas Author, Carol Thomas Author Blog, Choc Lit, Jofee Books, Little Museum of Hope, Mental Health Matters, Sally Jenkins, Wellbeing, Writing and Mental Healthcarol

I am delighted to offer a warm publication week welcome to Sally Jenkins as she discusses emotional baggage and the benefits of letting it go. Over to you, Sally …

Emotional baggage – we all carry it, don’t we? I’m talking about the fall-out from the bad things that happen in everyone’s lives, things like relationship breakups, bereavement, redundancy and family problems. With that emotional baggage often comes physical baggage, too, such as the engagement ring that we didn’t throw back at him in the heat of the moment because why should he have it back when he’s hurt us so badly? Or maybe it’s our old workplace name badge and lanyard that used to make us feel confident and part of a team before we lost our job. Now, when we look at these objects our sense of loss and being cast aside is heightened. Our mental health suffers.

We know we should bin these objects and move on with our lives. But it’s not easy to discard something that still holds a trace of happy memories – even if those memories have mostly been soured. Emotional baggage causes stress, depression, and anger. It weighs us down and allows our past experiences to undermine our chances for a better future.

There is a solution:

The Museum of Broken Relationships.

The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb accepts and displays such emotionally-charged objects along with their stories. Donating to the museum is not as final as throwing something away but it puts the object out of reach, thus preparing the ground for a fresh, confident new start in life.

Ten years ago, I read an article about the Museum of Broken Relationships and it became the inspiration for a series of short stories, which in turn became the novel, Little Museum of Hope. In the story, Vanessa is knocked for six by divorce and redundancy and is looking for a way forward in life. She hears about the Zagreb museum and opens her own version of it in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter in England. She names it the Little Museum of Hope and within the museum she creates the Café of the Mended Heart, which provides comfort food for those feeling emotionally fragile. Vanessa offers donors the chance to offload their stories as well as their objects and, as they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.

But the museum has only ten months to start turning a profit and Vanessa is faced with another challenge when her ex-husband, who still owns half of the marital home, reappears. Plus, her terrible baking means that she is losing money buying-in cakes for the café.

Donors to both the real-life Museum of Broken Relationships and the fictional Little Museum of Hope make the decision to stop letting their emotional baggage rule their lives. They recognise the need to stop dwelling on what might have been and focus on positivity for the future. I hope all the readers of Little Museum of Hope will take inspiration from the stories of the museum donors, cast aside their own emotional (and physical) baggage and move towards a future full of hope, positivity and love.

About Little Museum of Hope

A jar of festival mud, a photo album of family memories, a child’s teddy bear, a book of bell ringing methods, an old cassette tape, a pair of slippers …

These are the items that fill the exhibit shelves in Vanessa Jones’ museum. At first glance, they appear to have nothing in common, but that’s before you find out the stories behind them …

Because Vanessa’s Little Museum of Hope is no ordinary museum – its aim is to help people heal by donating items associated with shattered lives and failed relationships and in doing so, find a way to move on, perhaps even start again.

The museum soon becomes a sanctuary for the broken hearts in Vanessa’s city, and she’s always on hand to offer a cup of tea, a slice of cake and a listening ear.

But could the bringer of Hope need a little help moving on herself?

Discover more and purchase here: Amazon

About the author:

Sally Jenkins lives in the West Midlands of England. When not writing, she feeds her addiction to words by working part-time in her local library, running two reading groups and giving talks about her writing. Sally can also be found walking, church bell ringing and enjoying shavasana in her yoga class.

Discover more about Sally Jenkins and her work here: Website and Blog | Twitter| Instagram | Facebook | Newsletter

Thank you for stopping by, Sally. Little Museum of Hope sounds wonderful and I look forward to reading it. Enjoy the rest of your publication celebrations. xx

Location, Location, Location with Kirsty Ferry.

21/04/2023Guest Post, Location!, Writing & ReadingBea's Magical Summer Garden, Carol Thomas, Carol Thomas Author, Carol Thomas Author Blog, Choc Lit, Kirsty Ferry, romance, Schubert series, Schubert the catcarol

I am delighted to welcome fellow Choc Lit author Kirsty Ferry to my blog to talk about the setting of her latest novel Bea’s Magical Summer Garden. Over to you Kirsty …

My new book, Bea’s Magical Summer Garden, features – well – a magical summer garden. I have taken some liberties with the location of the Garden and removed it plant by plant from Dilston Physic Garden, near Corbridge in Northumberland, to an unspecified location near Edinburgh in Scotland. I probably wouldn’t have located it near Edinburgh if I’d thought ahead, but I needed to do that because it is part of the Schubert the Cat series of books, which began with Every Witch Way.

Every Witch Way follows the adventures of Nessa, who lives in Edinburgh when she heads off on a Halloween road trip across Scotland to find out more about a legendary witch. I blithely gave Nessa four brothers, and when I realised each brother needed a book, the location stuck – because Schubert is an incredibly meddlesome cat and needs to be within easy access of each of his ‘uncles’ to help them find love. And I will forever be grateful to Joanne from Portobello Books, who helped me work out where pirates might have been executed on the Sands of Leith for It Started with a Pirate!

We first meet Bea, the owner of the Garden, in the fifth book, It Started with a Wedding – her cousin Fae is the heroine of that one; and, if you’ve read It Started with a Wedding, you’ll know why Bea’s Garden was a perfect setting for a lot of the action.

So the ‘real’ Magical Garden is quite a bit further south, but if you are ever in the area, I completely recommend you go. The place is an amazing mishmash of eclectic, scientific and spiritual; each plant, for example, has a sign in front of it telling you the folklore and magic side of things and the scientific health and wellbeing information. Dilston was created by Professor Elaine Perry, who is a prominent UK neuroscientist and is one of the most interesting and lovely people I have ever met. The first time I set foot in Dilston, I knew it had to appear in a book someday.

The wider estate that Bea’s Magical Summer Garden is set on, Glentavish Estate, is completely out of my imagination. The hidden gates that separate Glentavish House from Bea’s Garden owe a lot to ideas that sparked when I first read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett as a child, and maybe look more like something from Wallington in Northumberland, only with a higher wall!

Wallington in Northumberland

The Temple to the Four Winds that is alluded to in the book was inspired by the one at Castle Howard – only it is much, much smaller. When you read the book, you’ll get the idea why that had to be so!

The Temple to the Four Winds at Castle Howard.

I could genuinely draw you a map of how the ‘estate’ looks in my mind, but then it might spoil it for your imagination. I do hope you’ll read the book, though, and see it the way I see it. Because then I’ll know I’ve done a decent job writing it…and the locations might make sense when they are all plopped down in Schubert’s world.

This is the website for the real Magical Garden if you want to check it out: Dilston Physic Garden.

About the book

What’s not to love about Bea’s Garden?
Its higgledy-piggledy layout, fascinating plants and occasional resident black cat makes it the most charming place to visit on a sunny afternoon. Plus Bea has bees – and her Honey Festival is sure to create a buzz.

But not everyone thinks Bea’s Garden is the bee’s knees.

The Man at the Big House next door has been a thorn in Bea’s side for the longest time, with his unnecessarily snippy letters about her beautiful climbing plants ruining his ‘clean lines’. Could he and his poisonous project manager Carla pose problems for her Festival? Or can Bea rely on the Man’s cousin – and her newest annual pass holder – Marcus Rainton to fight her corner?

With bee best friends, big black cats, a secret garden gate and a surprising identity reveal, Bea’s Garden is surely in line for its most magical summer yet!

Buying Links can be found here: Kirsty Ferry (choc-lit.com)

About the author:

Kirsty Ferry is from the North East of England and lives there with her husband and son. She won the English Heritage/Belsay Hall National Creative Writing competition in 2009 and has had articles and short stories published in various magazines. Her work also appears in several anthologies, incorporating such diverse themes as vampires, crime, angels and more.

Kirsty loves writing ghostly mysteries and interweaving fact and fiction. The research is almost as much fun as writing the book itself, and if she can add a wonderful setting and a dollop of history, that’s even better.

Her day job involves sharing a building with an eclectic collection of ghosts, which can often prove rather interesting.

You can follow Kirsty and find out more about her work here: Facebook | Twitter | website | blog

Thank you so much for stopping by my blog, Kirsty, and for sharing this insight into the setting of Bea’s Magical Summer Garden. xx

Location, Location, Location with Caroline James.

07/04/2023Guest Post, Location!Carol Thomas, Carol Thomas Author, Carol Thomas Author Blog, Caroline James, Caroline James Author, Location, One More Chapter, The Cruise, The Spa Breakcarol

I’m pleased to welcome Caroline James to my blog, not least because her post is going to whisk us away for some Easter sun as she tells us all about her forthcoming novel, The Cruise, and the inspiration behind its exotic setting. Over to you, Caroline …

A Caribbean sunset.

‘Can you write a romcom, set in an exotic location, about three friends in their sixties, heading off on a luxury cruise?’

That was a question from my publisher when discussing the brief for my new novel, The Cruise. Yes, I most certainly could! It was a pinch myself moment when I heard the title and the subject matter. Here was an opportunity to set the novel in a place I knew well and to virtually revisit the Caribbean.

My characters are three friends in their sixties. Kath is widowed, Jane unmarried, and Anne is almost-divorced. They join the Diamond Star, a luxury ship for those of a certain age, to set sail on a Christmas cruise, little knowing how their troubled lives are about to change.

Jane, Kath and Anne.

The story gathered pace as I wrote, and the ladies journeyed through the islands. I relived a time when I, too, discovered the Caribbean, when, in my early twenties, I was married to a Bajan man. We’d met when we were both working in London.

I was a naïve young girl when I first experienced life in Barbados and the islands. Still, memories don’t fade, and my recollection of those days served me well when writing The Cruise. Characters that I saved in my story bank began to come to life. Here was an opportunity to enrich the narrative, for I was familiar with the setting. I could taste the smoky rum and feel the tropical sun on my skin. I remembered the beautiful tranquil Caribbean Sea lapping soft white sands, contrasting with the wilder Atlantic rolling over miles of empty beach, where the two seas meet at northern points on some islands.

The Caribbean Sea in Barbados.

It was a joy to take my characters to markets in Martinique or an aerial tour of Antigua. I joined them on the balcony of their cabin to witness a stunning sunrise and magical sunset where the flame-like sky was hypnotic.

The fish market women who feature in The Cruise.

My marriage didn’t last, but I had reason to revisit the Caribbean a couple of decades later when my son owned a business there. For several years I indulged in a way of life so different from my life in northern England, and Barbados became a second home.

In The Cruise, Kath, Jane and Anne take an island tour around Barbados, and I couldn’t stop smiling as I wrote the chapter. Suddenly, incidents that had amused me on the island helped shape their tour. From the taxi driver smoking whacky baccy in his weed wagon, eating chicken feet in a rum shop, then swimming unknowingly in shark-infested waters, my ladies experience it all!

Whatever location your travels take you to, take care, safe journeys and happy reading.

With love,
Caroline. x

Thank you so much for sharing your inspiration, Caroline. It was great to hear more about the location of your novel, which is my current read, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. As you would say, I am sure it is going to fly! xx

THE CRUISE

Three friends set sail on a luxury cruise…

Will they be able to catch a husband on the open seas?

When widowed Kath, unmarried Jane and almost-divorced Anne decide to set off on a Caribbean cruise, they have no idea how their lives are about to change! The friends leave behind heartache and disappointment and, determined to find Anne a new husband, swap Christmas turkeys and BBC reruns for crystal waters, white sandy beaches and smooth golden rum. Throwing caution (and tradition) to the wind, they begin to husband hunt on the luxurious cruise ship. But will Anne get her wish, and will the friends find the comfort and joy they seek aboard the Diamond Star? With a cast of colourful characters from naturist Bridgette, con-artist gigolo Dicky and Londoner Selwyn, who is letting his old life go as he too embraces the new – all is revealed in this sparkling new novel by Caroline James.

The Cruise – Publishing as an eBook on 20^th April 2023 / Paperback July 6^th 2023

Publisher: One More Chapter for Harper Collins UK

Links: Amazon | Apple Books | Kobo

About the author:

Best-selling author of women’s fiction, Caroline James has owned and run businesses encompassing all aspects of the hospitality industry, a subject that often features in her novels. She is based in Lancashire but has a great fondness for travel and escapes whenever she can. A public speaker, which includes talks and lectures on cruise ships, Caroline is a member of the RNA, the SWWJ and the SOA. In her spare time, Caroline likes to swim in a local lake or walk with Fred, her Westie.