Saturday 15 November 2014

NICE GIRLS DON'T... by Sue Barnard


Who knows what secrets lie hidden in your family’s past?

Southern England, 1982.

At 25, single, and under threat of redundancy from her job in a local library, Emily feels as though her life is going nowhere – until the day when Carl comes into the library asking for books about tracing family history.

Carl is baffled by a mystery about his late grandfather: why is the name by which Carl had always known him different from the name on his old passport?

Fascinated as much by Carl himself as by the puzzle he wants to solve, Emily tries to help him find the answers. As their relationship develops, their quest for the truth takes them along a complicated paper-trail which leads, eventually, to the battlefields of the Great War.

In the meantime, Emily discovers that her own family also has its fair share of secrets and lies. And old sins can still cast long shadows…

Can Emily finally lay the ghosts of the past to rest and look forward to a brighter future?

A tale of discovery, love and fate.




NICE GIRLS DON'T is available from
  


 SUE BARNARD

Sue was born in Wales some time during the last millennium.

After graduating from Durham University with a degree in French, she returned to Manchester (where she had spent her formative years) and got married, then had a variety of office jobs before leaving the world of paid employment to become a full-time parent.  If she had her way, the phrase “non-working mother” would be banned from the English language.

Sue has dabbled with writing for most of her life.  Her first success was at primary school, where she won a competition run by Cadbury’s which involved writing an essay about chocolate.  Her prize was a tin containing a selection of Cadbury’s products.  She still has the tin to this day, and keeps it as a reminder of her humble writing origins.  The chocolate is long since gone, but the tin is now home to her supply of pens and pencils.  In recent years she began to take writing more seriously and studied a series of writing courses with the Open University.  As well as having work published in Best of Manchester Poets (Volumes 2 and 3), her achievements have included winning a T-shirt for writing a limerick (which summed up the plot of Macbeth in five lines) and winning first prize in Writing Magazine’s 2013 poetry competition for new subscribers.  In 2013 she joined the editorial team of Crooked Cat Publishing, who also published her debut novel The Ghostly Father (a new interpretation of the Romeo & Juliet story) in February 2014, and her second novel Nice Girls Don’t (a romantic intrigue set in 1982) in July 2014. Sue’s mind is sufficiently warped that she has also worked as a question-setter for BBC Radio 4’s fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz – a phase of her life which caused one of her sons to describe her as “professionally weird.”  She lives in Cheshire and Anglesey (thought not at the same time – she isn’t THAT weird) with her husband and a large collection of unfinished scribblings. Blog: http://broad-thoughts-from-a-home.blogspot.co.uk/ PROMO BLITZ DAY 15TH NOVEMBER  

Thursday 6 November 2014

A Spell in Provence soon to be published!

A SPELL IN PROVENCE is now available for pre-order at Accent Press. 


And here is the blurb!

With few roots in England and having just lost her job, Amy Carter decides to give up on home and start a new life in France, spending her redundancy package turning an overgrown Provençal farmhouse, Bellefontaine, into a successful hotel.

Though she has big plans for her new home, none of them involves falling in love – least of all with Fabien Coste, the handsome but arrogant owner of a nearby château.  As romance blossoms, eerie and strange happenings in Bellefontaine hint at a dark mystery of the Provençal countryside which dates back many centuries and holds an entanglement between the ladies of Bellefontaine and the ducs de Coste at its centre. As Amy works to unravel the mystery, she begins to wonder if it may not just be her heart at risk, but her life too.  

http://www.accentpress.co.uk/Book/13421/A-Spell-in-Provence.html