Category: Blog Tour

#BookReview This Shining Life by Harriet Kline @RandomTTours @TransworldBooks

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This Shining Life BT Poster

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for This Shining Life by Harriet Kline. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Transworld for my review copy. Given the beautiful cover, it was quite hard to opt for a digital rather than a physical copy. However I’m always conscious that the latter are in short supply and not everyone is able to read digitally.

This Shining Life CoverAbout the Book

For Rich, life is golden. He fizzes with happiness and love. But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

When Rich dies, he leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. His wife, Ruth, can’t imagine living without him and finds herself faced with a grief she’s not sure she can find her way through.

At the same time, their young son Ollie becomes intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?

But when they discover a mismatched collection of presents left by Rich for his loved ones, it provides a puzzle for them to solve, one that will help Ruth navigate her sorrow and help Ollie come to terms with what’s happened. Together, they will learn to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, and treasure the true gift that Rich has left them: the ability to embrace life and love every moment.

Format: eARC (320 pages)        Publisher: Transworld
Publication date: 1st July 2021 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

This Shining Life is an intimate exploration of the impact of Rich’s diagnosis and subsequent death on the members of his extended family. All of them struggle to cope in different ways, partly because some of them face other challenges on top of their grief at his loss, such as difficult childhood memories or caring responsibilities. The book switches between before and after Rich’s death and unfolds from the points of view of a number of family members, including Rich himself.

The most powerful of these for me were the sections told – in the first person- by Rich’s young son, Ollie. Ollie’s neuro diversity gives him an unique perspective as he struggles to interpret the words and actions of others, in everyday life let alone at a time of such heightened emotions. As he says, “I hate trying to work out special meanings. You can never be sure whether you’ve got them right of wrong”. Indeed, a particularly interesting aspect of the book is the way it explores how we interpret the meaning of words and learn to discern whether their use is literal, metaphorical or merely a ‘turn of phrase’ such as Rich’s personal favourite, ‘Life’s too short’.

Ollie, in particular, exemplifies this struggle to understand the meaning of words in his touchingly literal interpretation of his father’s remark that life is a puzzle. It’s a puzzle Ollie is determined to solve, applying himself to the task with the same determination he did to memorising the names of the members of football teams or to solving sudoku puzzles.

Rich’s desire to leave gifts behind that will communicate to the recipients what they meant to him involves much careful thought on his part. And perhaps it is that degree of thought that, in the end, means just as much to the recipients as the gifts themselves. In fact, the whole gifting process turns out to be an apt metaphor for the emotional confusion that often follows a bereavement.

This Shining Life tackles some big subjects including terminal illness, caring for people with dementia, bereavement and mental illness. However, the author always manages to stay the right side of the maudlin or sentimental. And a cover quote by an author of the pedigree of Rachel Joyce describing the book as ‘exquisitely beautiful and compelling’ is not one that can be easily ignored is it?

In three words: Tender, emotional, insightful

Try something similar: One Last Time by Helga Flatland

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Harriet Kline Author PicAbout the Author

Harriet Kline works part time registering births, deaths and marriages and writes for the rest of the week. Her story Ghost won the Hissac Short Story Competition and Chest of Drawers won The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Other short stories have been published online with Litro, For Books’ Sake, and ShortStorySunday, and on BBC Radio 4.

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#Extract The Lady in the Veil by Allie Cresswell

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Lady in the Veil by Allie Cresswell. The book continues the story of the Talbot family who featured in Tall Chimneys and The House in the Hollow but works equally well as a standalone. I’m delighted to be able to bring you an extract from The Veiled Lady but, before I do, let Allie explain a bit more about the inspiration for the character of Mrs Quince who features in it.

“My new novel, The Lady in the Veil, is set in the year 1835, post Regency but pre-Victorian. Its predecessor, The House in the Hollow, was set firmly in the Georgian era, and as such I delighted in emulating an Austenesque style. But it seemed to me that this later period called for the addition of the colour and exuberance demonstrated by later writers. Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz was published in 1836, with The Pickwick Papers following a year later. Dickens embraced characters of what Austen would call ‘low degree’ who are nevertheless charming, humorous, appealing and salutary. I came up with Mrs Quince, a lady who makes her living by letting rooms in her little house.”

The Lady in the VeilAbout the Book

What secrets hide beneath the veil?

When her mother departs for a tour of the continent, Georgina is sent from the rural backwaters to stay with her cousin, George Talbot, in London. The 1835 season is at its height, but Georgina is determined to attend neither balls nor plays, and to eschew Society. She hides her face beneath an impenetrable veil. Her extraordinary appearance only sets off gossip and speculation as to her identity. Who is the mysterious lady beneath the veil?

Format: ebook (270 pages)             Publisher:
Publication date: 13th June 2021   Genre: Historical Fiction

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Extract from The Lady in the Veil by Allie Cresswell

Mrs Quince was the lady of the house, the widow-woman to whom Arthur had earlier referred. Her husband had been the captain of a river boat, trading goods and passengers up and down the Thames. Whatever stories of seafaring adventure and distant shores the various mementoes of the room suggested, they had not been Captain Quince’s. He had never travelled beyond East Tilbury in pursuance of his trade and had died a relatively young man. For the twenty or so years since his demise Mrs Quince had supported herself by accommodating lodgers in her cottage – usually sailors – and it was to these guests that her collection of maritime accoutrements could be attributed.

That Mrs Quince had been, in her youth, a lady of remarkable beauty, was unarguable. Popular opinion in Rotherhithe reported it so and Mrs Quince herself was far from contradicting what her neighbours were so adamantly certain of. Indeed, if anything, she rather thought that their protestations did not go quite far enough, for to say that she had been a beauty in her youth almost suggested that her youth was a thing now ended. What’s more it did not, in her opinion, give sufficient recognition to the significant degree of her current beauty. It may be that her eyes were not as sharp as they had once been, or that the brilliance of her little square of looking glass had become somewhat tarnished, but where others now saw hair that was greying and thin, to Mrs Quince it was as thick and lustrous as it had ever been. Her skin, which an unkind observer might have described as mottled was, to her, as peach-like as could be. A very dull-eyed person may have discerned a little hairiness about the chin and upper lip, or mistaken a natural beauty-spot for a wart, and someone with no knowledge of the matter could have described the perfect plumpness of Mrs Quince’s figure as fat, but Mrs Quince could be compassionate about their errors, telling herself that swine could not help their nature and she would certainly not waste her pearls before them.

Part and parcel of Mrs Quince’s charming appearance was an ineffable elegance of manner and an unswerving pretention to being a lady. Whichever hand had been at work polishing and scrubbing during the day, beating carpets and brushing cushions, carrying coals, making stew and providing all the homely comforts that had greeted Arthur on his return from work, there could be no misapprehension of that hand belonging to Mrs Quince. She, it was to be inferred, spent her day at ladylike pursuits whilst a hired drudge did the donkey work. The drudge in the case was Pansy, a slip of girl, small-boned and big-eyed, timid and altogether understanding of her place.

Allie CresswellAbout the Author

Allie was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil. Allie recalls: ‘I was about 8 years old. Our teacher asked us to write about a family occasion and I launched into a detailed, harrowing and entirely fictional account of my grandfather’s funeral. I think he died very soon after I was born; certainly I have no memory of him and definitely did not attend his funeral, but I got right into the details, making them up as I went along (I decided he had been a Vicar, which I spelled ‘Vice’). My teacher obviously considered this outpouring very good bereavement therapy so she allowed me to continue with the story on several subsequent days, and I got out of maths and PE on a few occasions before I was rumbled.’

She went on to do a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London. She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.

She has two grown-up children, two granddaughters and two grandsons, is married to Tim and lives in Cumbria.

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