Category: Blog Tour

Blog Tour/Guest Post: The Spitfire Girl in the Skies by Fenella J Miller

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I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Spitfire Girl in the Skies by Fenella J Miller, the second book in her ‘The Spitfire Girls’ series.  You can read Fenella’s fascinating guest post about why she became a writer below.

Thanks to Vicky at Aria for inviting me to take part in the tour.  Do check out the tour banner at the bottom of this post to see the other great book bloggers taking part.

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The Spitfire Girl in the SkiesAbout the Book

The ATA training base, Hampshire, 1940.

Ellie Simpson is attached to an Air Transport Auxiliary base in Hampshire. Life as an ATA pilot is tough, but despite the long hours and danger, Ellie can think of nowhere she’d rather be. Not only does she love flying, but doing important war work, alongside new-found friends, provides a welcome distraction from worrying about loved ones fighting on the front line.

Being an ATA girl is definitely exciting, but as Ellie soon finds out wearing the distinctive blue uniform also means putting her life on the line every time she takes to the skies. It will take friendship and a strength she didn’t know she possessed to help her county – and those she loves – to survive.

An inspiring story of an incredible girl going above and beyond during World War II.

Format: Paperback, ebook (334 pp.)    Publisher: Aria
Published: 2nd April 2019  Genre: Historical Fiction

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

Find The Spitfire Girl in the Skies on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Why I Am A Writer’ by Fenella J. Miller

I was always an avid reader. By the time I was ten years old I’d read every book in the children’s section of the library and was allowed to borrow from the adult section. Leslie Charteris, Georgette Heyer, Margery Allingham – I read everything they wrote. I was also addicted to school stories and pony books. Lorna Hill was the writer I wanted to emulate. When I was about twelve, I wrote a 30,000-word book in her style. It would be called fan fiction now. This was when I decided I wanted to be writer.

I didn’t write anything else apart from essays and dissertations until I wrote a contemporary romance whilst trapped at home with a four-year-old in a remote country cottage and not able to drive. I was in my twenties then and knew one day I would be a published writer.

Decades passed and my goal was still to write, but life got in the way. I wrote five modern romances which are languishing somewhere in a box in the loft, before realising I should be a historical writer, not a contemporary one.  I was offered early retirement from teaching and finally achieved my dream of being published by the time I was sixty.

Thirteen years later I have around sixty books out. I write because I have to – I am a writer first and a wife/mother/sister/friend second.  If I couldn’t lose myself in my writing, I would not be able to cope with my home life. I have been my husband’s carer for years and after breaking first one and then the other hip he is now in permanent care. This is so hard for both of us. He has vascular dementia and no speech but is still aware of his surrounding and the people around him.

As long as I can write everyday life doesn’t seem to bad. Writing can be a lonely business but over the years I’ve been lucky to build up a large circle of both online and actual friends who are a constant support. I would advise anyone who dreams of being a writer one day to follow that dream and never give up.      © Fenella J Miller

Fenella MillerAbout the Author

Fenella J Miller was born in the Isle of Man. Her father was a Yorkshire man and her mother the daughter of a Rajah. She has worked as a nanny, cleaner, field worker, hotelier, chef, secondary and primary teacher and is now a full time writer. She has over thirty eight Regency romantic adventures published plus four Jane Austen variations, three Victorian sagas and seven WW2 family sagas. She lives in a pretty, riverside village in Essex with her husband and British Shorthair cat. She has two adult children and three grandchildren.

Connect with Fenella

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

The Spitfire Girl in the Skies blog tour poster

Blog Tour/Book Review: The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan

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I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, which was published on 4th April 2019 by World Editions, in a new translation by Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe.  You can read my review below.

Thanks to Julia at Ruth Killick Publicity for inviting me to participate in the tour and to World Editions for my advance review copy of The Storyteller.  The blog tour kicked off yesterday with an extract from the book hosted by Liz Loves Books.

Watch Pierre Jarawan talking about the book here.

The_Storyteller_CoverAbout the Book

Samir leaves the safety and comfort of his family’s adopted home in Germany for volatile Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him.

The Storyteller follows Samir’s search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skilful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller

Format: Paperback, ebook (468 pp.)    Publisher: World Editions
Published: 4th April 2019   Genre: Literary Fiction, Translated Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Waterstones | Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Storyteller on Goodreads

My Review

Opening with a dramatic and intriguing prologue, the book is structured in three parts, moving between Lebanon and Germany over a period of more than thirty years.   In the first part, the reader experiences firsthand the close relationship between Samir and his father, a man who charmed everyone he met by never forgetting a name, being the life and soul of any party and, most importantly, telling Samir the most wonderful bedtime stories.  Along the way, we learn of the family’s flight from war-torn Beirut to Germany in the 1980s along with many other refugees.

However, one night everything changes seemingly as a result of something as simple as a photograph.  It leads to Samir’s father’s disappearance, an event which will shape the course of Samir’s life.   The dramatic impact of this on young Samir, his mother and sister, Alina, is convincingly conveyed.  Eventually, Samir travels to Beirut in search of his father because it seems to be the only way he can move on in his life and settle down to a career and relationship. What he learns will involve long-buried secrets, the complex political history of Lebanon (there’s a useful short history at the end of the book) and explore questions of national identity.  And Samir comes to realise that perhaps his father’s imaginative and colourful stories hid the truth all along if he’d only known it.

The theme of storytelling pervades the book, whether that’s something as innocent as bedtime stories or the thrill of telling a story to an appreciative audience.  Or the stories that a photograph can reveal, the contested stories a nation tells about itself or the stories of the hidden that don’t get told.

I loved the descriptive writing in the book, skilfully preserved by translators, Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe.  Like this about young Samir’s new home: ‘The smell of fresh paint drifted like a cheerful tune through the rooms.’  The book contains fascinating information about Lebanon: its culture, food, complex politics, turbulent recent history and, of course, the famed cedars of Lebanon.  In fact, you could say that, at its heart, The Storyteller is a love letter to Lebanon as much as a story about a young man’s search for the truth about his father.  On either count, The Storyteller is a fascinating, intriguing and beautifully written book that I can highly recommend.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, World Editions.

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In three words: Compelling, multi-layered, thought-provoking

Try something similar…The Glass Diplomat by S.R. Wilsher (read my review here)

Pierre_Jarawan_Author_PicAbout the Author

Pierre Jarawan was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at the age of three. Inspired by his father’s imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of thirteen. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, and in 2016 was named Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper Abendzeitung. Jarawan received a literary scholarship from the City of Munich (the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, which went on to become a bestseller and booksellers’ favourite in Germany and the Netherlands. (Photo credit: Marvin Ruppert)

Connect with Pierre

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

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