I am thrilled to be on the blog tour for my dear friend Sandy Barker and her latest (and last) installment in the Ever After Agency series, I Knew You Were Trouble.
The BRAND NEW instalment in Sandy Barker’s gorgeously romantic Ever After Agency series. Don’t get mad. Get even.
Kate Whitaker has always believed in love, but when a stranger named Willem shows up on her doorstep, the news he has to share isn’t as exciting as his god-like looks might suggest. He’s come to tell her that Kate’s fiancé is also engaged to his sister.
Kate doesn’t know how she didn’t see the red Jon’s work as an airline pilot having him flying around the globe, the postponed dates, the huge rock of an engagement ring that isn’t her style at all.
Overcome with fury – and entranced by the Nordic god’s piercing blue eyes and quiet allure – Kate agrees to accompany Willem to his hometown of Amsterdam to help break the news to his sister. Yet what begins as a simple gesture of support soon twists into a deliciously devious plan to get back at Jon.
Kate is drawn into a world of retribution, revenge and – unexpectedly – romance. Because sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else…
A laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about broken trust, sweet revenge, and the surprising places we find love. Perfect for fans of Sophie Kinsella and Emily Henry.
😭😭😭 I’m not crying for any negative reason; it’s because this may be the last in the Ever After Agency Series, and I have become so invested in the characters that reappear, story after story! But let’s not dwell on my sadness. Let’s embrace the fun of the story! There’s a little twist in the tale this time, as Poppy, our favourite matchmaker from the Ever After Agency, engages in an activity for a client that is most definitely not matchmaking! Poppy’s client, Kate, is reeling from discovering that her fiancé, Jon, is a two (three?) timing serial fiancé. Having originally found him through a match with another agency, Kate contacts Poppy for some help with revenge! Oh, but the plot thickens. Kate finds she has feelings for the Thor-like Nordic Willem, who opens her eyes to the deception she has suffered. And he happens to be fiancé #2’s brother… I’m not saying any more about the plot because you need to read the book, but suffice to say it was so engaging that I read it in one sitting. We have a bit of travel, lots of ‘will they-won’t they?’ moments and some great side characters in the form of fiancé #2, almost fiancé 3, and Kate’s cousin Margot, who is hilarious! I love that though the story is about a particular client, we get constant updates about Poppy, a pivotal character in all the series books. And her life is about to take its own new turn… are you sure this will be the end, Sandy B? Many thanks to NetGalley and Boldwood Books for an ARC.
Sandy Barker is a writer, traveller and hopeful romantic.
Sandy’s first novel, One Summer in Santorini, a romantic comedy set in Greece and inspired by her own real-life love story with her partner, Ben, was published in 2019 by One More Chapter (HarperCollins), launching the 5-book Holiday Romance series. Also with One More Chapter are her Christmas Romance series, celebrating her favourite time of year, and The Dating Game, a stand-alone romcom set in the world of Reality TV.
Sandy’s new 5-book romcom series with Boldwood Books is about the Ever After Agency, a bespoke matchmaking agency based in London, with a brilliant cast of characters and settings around the world.
My Blog Tour visit for Under One Sky By Zoe Folbigg.
From bestseller Zoë Folbigg comes this beautiful, romantic tale of finding love in the most unexpected places. Under the midnight sun of Arctic Norway, Cecilie goes online looking for friends, and stumbles across Hector Herrera. They start chatting and soon realise that they might have just fallen in love. But there’s a Hector lives thousands of miles away in Mexico. And he’s running from a tragic past.
Cecilie’s whole life has been anchored by sticking to what she knows and her job at the cafe in the town in which she grew up. Can she really make a leap of faith for someone she’s never met? And will Hector break free to change the path he’s on?
An unforgettable story about two people, living two very different lives under the same sky, and whether they can cross oceans, seas and fjords to give their love a chance.
Told from the viewpoint of three characters, this story is set in multiple locations, from Arctic Norway, Mexico and England. Cecilie is a young woman who has never veered further than the country she was born in, Norway. She leads a self-contained life and is happy not to be too involved in anyone else’s life. She strikes up an online friendship with Hector, known as The Mexican by many in Cecilie’s life, but this becomes something more profound. Then there is British Kate. A woman who is struggling in her marriage, with a man who doesn’t appreciate her, and with a tenuous connection to Hector. There is a lot of time hopping within the story which can get a little confusing, but essentially, we are following how Cecilie and Hector met in a chatroom, how their relationship developed and all that happened in between. Kate’s chapters did feel a little redundant, as she is not really involved in Cecilie and Hector’s story, per se, until the end of the book. Maybe she deserves her own story. Many thanks to Boldwood Books for an ARC.
About the Author
Zoë Folbigg is author of Amazon number-one bestseller The Note, based on the true story of how she met her husband on her daily commute and Amazon Prime’s biggest selling Kindle book of 2018. Zoë has written for magazines and newspapers in the UK and around the world; she wrote a weekly column in Fabulous magazine documenting her year-long round-the-world trip with ‘Train Man’ – and now lives with him, their sons and their cat Margot in Hertfordshire. Her seventh book Five Days is out 26th July 2024. You can follow her on Instagram @zoefolbigg
Today, I am thrilled to be on the blog tour for The Ick by Holly Muculloch.
The Blurb
Girl meets boy. Girl gets the ick. Girl moves on.
Gem has a chronic case of the ick. Luckily for Gem, these icks are actually her intuition in disguise, warding her off of greater red flags which would surely develop later… or that’s Gem’s theory. Her best friend, Shanti, doesn’t buy it. In fact, in her training to become a Clinical Psychologist, Shanti decides to design her graduate study around Gem. To see if the ick is real, she challenges Gem to look past her intuition and date someone for an unimaginable six weeks, all for a fee of £5,000.
And who better to test the hypothesis than Atlas. He eats soup for lunch, wears a gigantic rucksack and winks at the end of cringy jokes – all impossible to look past. But, despite Gem’s best efforts, he’s also, she hates to admit it, quite funny, attentive, and kind (and not to mention extremely good looking). And whilst her gut shouts at her to run away, one date becomes, two, three, four, before she stops counting all together.
Can Gem do the impossible and start falling for Atlas? And what happens when he finds out she’s being paid to date him?
The Ick is a hilarious romance about the judgements we pass, the insecurities we harbour, and those relationships that force us to embrace vulnerability whole-heartedly.
Can I say that one thing this book didn’t give me was the Ick? It starts as a mild-mannered story, with Gem, our FMC, who finds it hard to commit because each time she meets a date, something inevitably puts her off, be it food, clothing, or a specific behaviour… also known as The Ick. She marks down the first date of the book… because he ate soup for lunch! Gem lives with her best friend, Shanti, who is training to be a clinical psychologist. She thinks there are commitment issues and that these ‘icks’ are more of an unconscious attempt to never say yes. And so, the central part of the story starts. Gem is signed up for a clinical study for Shanti’s thesis and has to date one person for a long time, despite ‘icks’ to see what happens. Enter Atlas. – Okay, so he entered earlier. He’s the soup eater. But what a wonderful character! He is that pure, gorgeous specimen, and you know he is just right for Gem. Only, can she get over the ‘ick’? And the side characters are just as great. Uncle Mick, who is like a surrogate father figure; Jay, the miserable corner shop owner who despite not uttering a word through the book, has his presence, and Shauna, the attitude-filled young footballer. I enjoyed reading this book because it goes deeper than the fundamental Ick issue. Gem’s background and her relationship with her mother all contribute to how she is right now.
Author Bio
As the fourth child in a busy household, Holly was often left to entertain herself. She wasn’t cool enough to hang out with her oldest siblings, and she wasn’t a good enough goalie to hang out with her younger sibling. Luckily, she quickly found the world of books and since then, she has never looked back. As a kid, Holly often went to sleep with at least four books underneath her pillow just in case she needed them. And she often did. Books have saved her time and time again.
After a stint working at a literary agency, then a stint working at a big four publisher, and then a stint working as a book buyer, Holly made the terrible decision to become a management consultant. After four years, and still no idea what the job actually entailed, books saved her once again. She wrote her first novel Just Friends (published by Transworld in 2020) when she needed to escape. Her second novel, The Mix-Up followed in 2021.
She is currently working as a freelance editor and writer, and lives in the outskirts of Oxford with her dog, who she lovingly named Schitthead (Ted) after the best TV programme known to man. She is fuelled by baked goods and a need to make people laugh.
If you want to get to know Holly (and Ted) better, follow her over on Instagram (@by.holly.mcculloch) where she mainly shares dog photos and curates memes.
I am thrilled to be on the Blog Tour for Happily Ever After by Jane Lovering!
Andi Glover loves nothing more than a good book.
Any book in fact because when you’re raised by unconventional parents who think school’s for squares, alongside a deeply conventional sister who escapes home as soon as she can, fiction is eminently preferable to reality.
The only problem is that fiction isn’t the best way to learn about the real world. When Andi starts her new live-in job at Templewood Hall for the eccentric Lady Dawe and her enigmatic son Hugo, it’s tempting to think she’s fallen into the pages of one of her favourite gothic novels.
But the plot twists at Templewood Hall are stranger than fiction and it’s not long before Andi questions if she’s living in a romance novel or a whodunnit. Bumps in the night, a missing heir, ghostly apparitions and secrets that have been kept for generations – the mysteries mount up. Then there’s the inscrutable gardener who seems to appear when needed – is Andi right to hope for a happily-ever-after end to her story?
Happily Ever After is a Gothic-inspired mystery with a slow-burn romance that picks up pace towards the end. Andi arrives at Templewood Hall and is accosted by a rude gardener before she is interviewed for a position that she hopes she’ll get because she has no qualifications for anything else and nowhere else to go. She lived a pretty unconventional life with her parents, moving around regularly and living in a converted bus. An opportunity arises for her to have a more normal life, though I’m not sure her position at Templewood Hall is anything close to normal! Tasked with cataloguing the many books in Lady Tanith Dawe’s library, Andi lets her love of books create a whimsical dream of falling in love and marrying the rather gorgeous son and heir, Hugo. However, she is covertly given the real reason for Lady Dawes’ wanting the library organised, and it has a bit of a twist. Is there romance? Yes, there is, but it doesn’t pick up speed until the book’s latter pages. But Andi’s love of the classics is evident in her dreams of what might be, and the chapter headings are a great nod to those classics. Some may find Andi a difficult character to like. She doesn’t always appear to help herself, but things change as the story progresses, and she has the ending she deserves. I tell you what, that Lady Dawes – she is a piece of work! A bit deluded! For me, the hero of the book was the feline, called The Master (we never find out his real name!), who smells of fish and takes a real shine to Andi, being her shadow, trying to sleep in her bed, and even getting her out of some scrapes! Many thanks to NetGalley and Boldwood Books for an ARC. Purchase Link https://mybook.to/happilyever
Author Bio –
Jane Lovering is a bestselling and multi-award winning romantic comedy writer. Most recently Jane won the RNA Contemporary Romantic Novel Award in 2023 with A Cottage Full of Secrets. She lives in Yorkshire and has a cat and a bonkers terrier, as well as five children who have now left home.
I am delighted to be a part of the book tour for the release of this translated title, Small By Rijula Das, published by Amazon Crossing.
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In the red-light district of Shonagachhi, Lalee dreams of trading a life of penury and violence for one of relative luxury as a better-paid ‘escort’. Her long-standing client, Trilokeshwar ‘Tilu’ Shau is an erotic novelist hopelessly in love with her. When a young girl who lives next door to Lalee gets brutally murdered, a spiral of deceit and crime begins to disturb the fragile stability of this underworld’s existence. One day, without notice, Lalee’s employer and landlady, the formidable Shefali Madam, decrees that she must now service wealthier clients at plush venues outside the familiar walls of the brothel. But the new job is fraught with unknown hazards and drives Lalee into a nefarious web of prostitution, pimps, sex rings, cults and unimaginable secrets that endanger her life and that of numerous women like her. As the local Sex Workers’ Collective’s protests against government and police inaction and calls for justice for the deceased girl gain fervour, Tilu Shau must embark on a life-altering misadventure to ensure Lalee does not meet a similarly savage fate. Winner of the 2021 Tata Literature Live! First Book Award – Fiction Longlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature 2021 SMALL DEATHS Rijula Das Set in Calcutta’s most fabled neighbourhood, Small Deaths is a literary noir as absorbing as it is heart-wrenching, holding within it an unforgettable story of our society’s outcasts and marking the arrival of a riveting new writer.
I was intrigued by this book after reading the blurb I was sent. A book centred around the oldest profession in time, set in the town of Shonagachhi, Calcutta, in India. We start by getting to know Tilu, an aspiring author of erotica who wants to get better recognition for more literary work. He visits the Blue Lotus in Shonagachhi whenever he can afford it to meet Lalee, his favourite concubine. A visit there ends with the other inhabitants of the house finding the body of one of the girls who lives among them. What follows is a tale of true sadness. These women don’t choose to be dragged into prostitution; however, once there, they are estranged from their loved ones due to the shame of the work they have been made to do. The other girls become their families. But nothing can stop the way society taints them and how they are looked upon as public property; the johns do whatever they want, and the madams who are there to ‘look after’ them are just as bad, selling them from one bad situation to another, and not often a better one. Here, an awful sex trafficking ring is exposed, involving a much-respected ‘holy’ man. But the violence that is used toward women is horrific. It made for uncomfortable reading, in some ways, but the sad truth is that these things do happen the world over; it’s just that we aren’t all privy to the knowledge. We see the story unfold through several viewpoints, including the above two characters, other girls from the Blue Lotus, police officers, a pimp, and some other random characters, which can be a little confusing but adds another layer to the story. An interesting but heartrending read.
About the Author
Rijula Das received her PhD in Creative Writing/prose-fiction in 2017 from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she taught writing for two years. She is a recipient of the 2019 Michael King Writers Centre Residency in Auckland and the 2016 Dastaan Award for her short story Notes From A Passing. Her short story, The Grave of The Heart Eater, was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019. Her short fiction and translations have appeared in Newsroom, New Zealand and The Hindu. She lives and works in Wellington, New Zealand.
Author Q & A
Tell us a little bit about your book, Small Deaths? Set entirely in the Calcutta’s red light district, Small Deaths is the story of Lalee, a sex worker trafficked into the trade as a child who dreams of trading her precarious life for that of a better-paid escort. Tilu Shau, her loyal client, makes a living writing cheap erotica and dreams of literary fame and Lalee’s love. When a young woman is murdered in Lalee’s brothel, the two of them are drawn into a misadventure that threatens the fragile stability of their lives and forces them to ask what is the price of one’s right to dignity, a future and a life?
The book was originally published as A Death in Shonagachhi – what role does the setting of Shonagachhi play in your novel? Sonagachi is a neighbourhood in North Kolkata, and the largest red-light district in Asia with several hundred multi-storey brothels where more than 30,000 commercial sex workers live and work. It is rare to find works of fiction set entirely in this area, even though the neighbourhood is one of Calcutta’s oldest. The novel is a product of my doctoral research on the relationship between sexual violence on women in India and public space; I looked at how we ‘allow’ women to access public spaces, and what punishments are meted out to them when they violate the unwritten rules. The red light district in traditional, patriarchal societies is a space of contradictions. They are often the oldest of neighbourhood, well-known and yet, unacknowledged spaces. I wanted to understand the way sex workers access a city where they are invisible citizens –– how they live, die, advocate, organise and make a life that is uniquely their own.
Why was it important to you to tell this story now? Living in the world we do, it is easy to forget that women’s rights are not actually indelible and unalienable. It is easy to be lulled into a sense of security. But women’s rights, or indeed the rights of vulnerable people, irrespective of gender identity is under siege at all times, many instances of which we are witnessing at present time. The right to bodily autonomy is an unfinished fight for us, as is the constant fight for the recognition and acknowledgement of women’s labour, wherever that may take place. Stories from the margins like that of women like Lalee, because they are real, living women, are a useful and timely reminder of where we are and how easy it is to deny human rights to vulnerable people even in this age.
How do you do your research? Your research specifically looks at the connections between public space and sexual violence – how did this inform your writing of Small Deaths? There is a wealth of both academic research and case studies and interviews with the sex workers of Shonagachhi. Social welfare organisations are extremely active in the area and have extensive grassroots knowledge. As I wrote Small Deaths over 7 years, the research seeped into the work, informing the fictional narrative, and sometimes changing or adding to the course of events. In creative work research informs the lived experience of the book’s universe, but it should never get in the way of the narrative. It’s often a tight-rope walk.
Tell us more about writing truthfully about sexual violence and why it was important to write on this theme? We’ve always written about sexual violence, but how we do it, matters. What we decide to show and what we decide to leave unsaid, matters. Very often we see gratuitous, even erotic portrayal of sexual violence in fiction. As someone who has faced sexual and other forms of violence as a woman, it changes the way I could write about it. I had to ask –– at what point does writing a sexual violence scene become voyeurism? How do I write with authenticity, empathy and truth and still reserve dignity for those on whom the violence occurs? Whose eyes and heart does the chapter look through, is it the victim or the abuser? There are certain expectations when a book deals with the life of women trafficked into sex-work, but the greatest satisfaction, for me, came in subverting any pandering to trauma-porn, or a representation of abject and unabated victimhood because that is not consistent with the reality of life on the margins.
Were there news stories that particularly inspired your work? Small Deaths is inspired by real people and real events, and where reality is shocking, invention is not only unnecessary but a travesty. I wanted the book to cleave as close to reality as possible and as such, a number of real events have inspired the action in the book. The scandal of an ashram called Dera Sacha Sauda where a powerful, self-styled guru held women hostage in a warren of rooms and sexually abused them for years has inspired events in the book. The disappearances and deaths of sex workers, and the migration of women across international borders for sex work in coercive circumstances have inspired both characters and events. It is however not one event, but a landscape and an ecosystem developed over decades that this story has grown from.
Are there any books that you would recommend to explore more about the themes in your novel? There are a number of academic works that I read and referred to while writing this book. Fictional work set entirely in Shonagachhi is harder to come by.
You have translated a number of books in your work, including Nabarun Bhattacharya’s short fiction. How do you think your translation work helps to inform your writing? Translation has definitely influenced how I use language. How we use English as Indian writers is evolving as our relationship with English becomes more organic, more intertwined with our multilinguality. Reading in diverse literary traditions, as translation helps us do, also changes my relationship with narrative form and storytelling.
What made you want to become a writer? Why fiction? I’m not sure we decide to become a writer any more than we decide to become ourselves. It does take a certain amount of practice, showing up for it over decades, a lot of hard work without any promise of reward or even the assurance that one should persevere, but we write because there is no other way to exist. Fiction allows me, personally, the necessary distance from myself to explore places that would feel too exposing to do as autobiography. It is also the sheer joy of being in other people’s heads, creating characters who are entirely different from me, and watching them take-off on their adventures.
Which other writers have informed your work? It is hard to see my own influences. I often read people whose work I enjoy as a reader but as a writer, we’d be widely different. I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan. His comedic brilliance and timing is so effective and subtle that you almost don’t realise the sheer genius required to pull it off. Jeanette Wintersen, Marguerite Duras and Borges have been abiding influences.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers? To stick with it. People often think of talent as the sole variable that makes a writer, and while there is such a thing, another very important variable is the ability to stay the course. It takes time to make even a bad book, a good one can and does take time to see the light of day.
What’s next for you? I’m finishing a translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel, soon to be published by Seagull Books. After that I hope to focus on my second novel.
But I Smile Anyway... 