Author: whatcathyreadnext

#BlogTour #BookReview One Day in Winter by Shari Low @Aria_Fiction

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I’m thrilled to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for One Day in Winter by Shari Low. (One glance at the blog tour posters at the bottom of this post will give you an idea of the array of fabulous book bloggers taking part in the tour.)  You can read my review of this engaging, emotional story of one momentous day in the lives of four people below.

Book coverAbout the Book

On a cold December’s morning…

Caro sets off to find the truth: has her relationship with her father been based on a lifetime of lies?

Cammy can’t wait to surprise the woman he loves with a proposal. All he needs is the perfect ring.

Lila can no longer hide her secret. She has to tell her lover’s wife about their affair.

After thirty years, Bernadette knows it’s time. She’s ready to leave her controlling husband… and never look back.

Over the course of twenty-four hours, four lives are about to change forever…

Format: Paperback (302 pp.)          Publisher: Aria
Published: 5th September 2019     Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk ǀ Amazon.com  ǀ Kobo ǀ Google Play
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find One Day in Winter on Goodreads

My Review

The story takes place over one day in the city of Glasgow. As it turns out, it will be a momentous day in the lives of four people and those close to them. Events unfold in two-hourly time slots with frequent switches between the different characters. As the action plays out, at times the reader is blessed with more information than the character (creating some “Uh-oh, that’s not going to happen” or “I have a bad feeling about this” moments) and at other times, we learn things alongside the characters (resulting in some “I wasn’t expecting that” moments).

So, let’s get to know the characters…Caro is setting off by train to track down the father who abandoned her and her mother years before. A post on Facebook, that she came across by chance, has led Caro to suspect that her father’s frequent absences on business during the years he and her mother were together may have been cover for something else entirely. Was he in fact leading a double life? Encouraged by her cousin, Todd, she’s determined to find out the truth and confront her father before it’s too late.

Menswear shop owner Cameron, known to his friends as Cammy, is planning to propose to his girlfriend. She’s the first woman he’s fallen for since he lost the love of his life to another man. Helped by pals, Josie and Val (hilarious characters, by the way), he’s chosen the perfect ring, the perfect suit, the perfect restaurant. Now he just needs everything to go to plan.

Lila’s interest is in snaring the married lover with whom she’s been having a passionate affair for years, unbeknownst to his wife. Lila’s determined that today’s the day he’ll tell his wife he’s leaving her – and if not, Lila’s going to do it for him.

Bernadette knows all about leaving because after thirty years of marriage  she’s had enough of her husband’s callous, controlling behaviour and she’s planning her departure for life as a free woman. But if she’s to make her escape, she needs to do it before he returns home.

The author manages the incredible feat of orchestrating the various strands of the plot and frequent changes in points of views so you never lose track of the story as the tension builds. I really liked the geographical near misses during the day as characters unknowingly pass close to each other – in shops, restaurants and streets.

I found myself particularly drawn to Caro and Bernadette. They seemed fully realised characters; like people you might meet in real life. I don’t believe anyone with an ounce of humanity can read this book without rooting for Bernadette and I liked how the author had Caro grow as a character, even with the period of one day.  Other characters seemed a little less finely drawn and the men in the book aren’t a terribly good advertisement for fatherhood! Although I couldn’t like Lila – self-obsessed, shallow and mercenary – I could admire her spirit and her ability to land on her feet (metaphorically only, as it turns out).

Even if I wasn’t drawn to all the characters, I was completely gripped by the complex threads of the story and intrigued to see how the author was going to pull everything together. Safe to say, she succeeded brilliantly. I’ll also admit I shed tears at one point and I’m not a sentimental person.  I can now see why Shari Low’s books are so popular.

Great storylines, clever plotting and engaging characters make One Day in Winter a very satisfying read.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Aria. (One Day in Winter was previously published under the title One Day in December.)

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In three words: Emotional, engaging, moving

Try something similar…It Was Only Ever You by Kate Kerrigan (click here to read my review)

ShariLowAbout the Author

Shari Low is the No.1 best-selling author of over 20 novels, including One Day In Winter, A Life Without You, The Story Of Our Life, With Or Without You, Another Day In Winter and her latest release, This Is Me. And because she likes to over-share toe-curling moments and hapless disasters, she is also the shameless mother behind a collection of parenthood memories called Because Mummy Said So. Once upon a time she met a guy, got engaged after a week, and twenty-something years later she lives near Glasgow with her husband, a labradoodle, and two teenagers who think she’s fairly embarrassing except when they need a lift.

Connect with Shari

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#BlogTour A Superior Spectre by Angela Meyer @SarabandBooks @LiteraryMinded

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SuS_blogtourposter FINAL

I’m delighted to welcome author Angela Meyer to What Cathy Read Next today as part of the blog tour for her novel A Superior Spectre. You can read my interview with Angela below.

SUS_coverAbout the Book

Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with shame, he runs away to a remote part of Scotland with a piece of beta tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice.

In the late 1860s, Leonora lives in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature. Contemplating the social conventions that bind her, her contented life and a secret romantic friendship with the local laird are interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh. But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions.

A Superior Spectre is a novel about curiosity, entitlement and manipulation. It reminds us that the scariest ghosts aren’t the ones that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul…

Format: Paperback (288 pp.)        Publisher: Saraband
Publication date:  15th August 2019  Genre: Crime/Thriller, Historical Fiction, Literary

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
*link provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find A Superior Spectre on Goodreads

Interview with Angela Meyer, author of A Superior Spectre

Angela, welcome to What Cathy Read Next. Without giving too much away, can you tell us a bit about A Superior Spectre?

Hi Cathy, thank you for having me on your blog! A selfish, dying man abuses an experimental technology that allows him to invade the mind of a nineteenth century Scottish woman. And while the book contains some big ideas, people have been finding it a page-turner (which is nice!).

The book is described as ‘a novel about curiosity, entitlement and manipulation’.  What attracted you to exploring those particular issues?

We often talk about curiosity in a positive way, but curiosity is skewed by power, and dominant or cultural ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. A Superior Spectre asks questions about this on a large and small scale.

My character Jeff is someone who has grown up under capitalism, who is taught to feel entitled to indulge his curiosity, his thoughts and emotions, and he comes up against the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ of his context. He dwells on, and feels great shame about, certain desires, and yet he continually invades the mind of a woman, and also treats the thoughts and feelings of other women in his life fairly dismissively. He’s a product of patriarchal capitalism, and I guess the novel is fairly sceptical about the fact that even with a literal empathic experience (living in Leonora’s head) it is difficult to shift what’s embedded in behaviour, in the mind.

I’m drawn to these themes because I’ve always been fascinated by the ways individual psychology is shaped by our social, political, cultural context (not just our immediate upbringing). There’s another layer to all this with the tech itself, and how readily we accept and incorporate new (commercially driven) technology into our lives.

In the book, Jeff ignores the advice to use the piece of experimental technology three times only. Is there a wider message there about our use (or misuse) of technology?

Tying in with the above, it’s quite a classic sci fi trope, really, but as relevant now than ever. The most incredible things are being done in neurotech. I just learned the other day about Elon Musk’s neuralink, for example. It’s all supposed to help people with devastating illness and disability. But they also say the tech will ‘enhance’ human ability. And who is going to have access to that first? Elon Musk. The one per cent. Who will also feel ‘entitled’ to enhance their abilities, to become superhuman? All of us in the West are taught we deserve such things…

A Superior Spectre is partly set in Scotland. What made you choose that as a location?

The simple answer is that it was just always set there. The idea itself was tied in with the place. I have spent a lot of time in Scotland and I love it deeply, like a person. I am not Scottish. I am part-Norwegian. I feel at home in these Northern landscapes. But my character, Jeff, is Australian, as I am. And it is his lens through which we see Scotland (partly or fully? Or at all? Readers decide when they read it).

Part of the book is set in the 1860s. How did you go about creating a picture of life in that period?

A combination of research, immersion in the places I write about, and some very ‘method’ writing which involved being holed up in isolated parts of Scotland with no electricity. I even stayed in Barnhill, George Orwell’s house, on the isle of Jura. Because so much of my writing is about sensation, about being in the body (or someone else being in your body!) I find that being or having been in the place you’re writing about, even if the past is just a ghost over the landscape, is helpful. But maybe I also, simply, feel entitled to my curiosity…

You’ve published award-winning short fiction.  Are the challenges of writing a full-length novel different and, if so, in what way?

So many years! And also structure. A novel has to have multiple threads, has to have tension, has to have a satisfying payoff (in a plot and/or character sense), has to contain so much and keep the reader interested for so long. It’s a huge challenge. Short stories are difficult, but you can play, abandon, start again. A short story could be ‘about’ the mood, the rhythm of the sentences, the voice – not just the story. But to write one that works, that is resonant, is also a huge challenge. I want to keep getting better in both these forms.

You’ve worked in publishing.  Did this help with the experience of seeing your own novel through to publication?

In Australia, because I am known in the industry, I think publishers did read it quite quickly, but it didn’t mean they picked it up! That took a year. What has been very helpful is understanding the publishing process. I know how hard it is to get published, how hard people work at all levels in publishing, and how limited the opportunities are for authors to have their books seen, read, talked about. I’ve truly been grateful for every opportunity, every stage of the process, and the fact that I get to go through it all again with A Superior Spectre now coming out in the UK.

Which other writers do you admire?

So many. Deborah Levy is a big one at the moment. Kafka has always been a favourite. John Cheever’s Diaries have been a wonderful companion in the last few years. Janet Frame. Australian writers Jane Rawson and Krissy Kneen. So many more…!

What are you working on next?

The next release is my Mslexia Award-winning novella, Joan Smokes. And I’m working on another novel, slowly…

Thanks, Angela, for those fascinating answers to my questions.

Screen-Shot-2019-05-13-at-13.34.13-wpcf_345x237About the Author

Angela Meyer’s Joan Smokes won the inaugural Mslexia Novella Competition in 2019. Her short fiction has been widely published, including in Best Australian Stories, Island, The Big Issue, The Australian, The Lifted Brow and Killings. By day she works as a publisher for Echo Publishing, an Australian imprint of Bonnier Books UK, and in this role has discovered and developed a range of award-winning, globally published and bestselling talent, including global number one bestselling author Heather Morris. A Superior Spectre, Angela’s debut novel, is already shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards.

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