Tag: Excerpt

Book Blitz #Giveaway Paintbrush by Hannah Buchin

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Today the spotlight is on Paintbrush, the debut novel by Hannah Bucchin.  Set in a community in North Carolina, you can find some sneak peeks below of this charming, romantic, coming-of-age story. (And don’t you just love that gorgeous cover?)

WinTheBeginningof EverythingPlus there’s a giveaway (INTL) with a chance to win a $5 Amazon giftcard and a copy of the bestselling The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider. To enter click here.

 

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PaintbrushAbout the Book

Mitchell Morrison and Josie Sedgwick have spent their whole lives at the Indian Paintbrush Community Village, a commune full of colourful characters tucked in the mountains of North Carolina, and they aren’t particularly close – at least, not anymore. Josie wishes she could spend all of her time at Paintbrush planting tomatoes, hiking the trails, or throwing giant communal birthday parties, while Mitchell can’t wait to escape the bizarre spiritual sharing and noisy community dinners. Luckily for both of them, high school graduation is just around the corner. But when Mitchell’s mother makes a scandalous announcement that rocks the close-knit Paintbrush community, and Josie’s younger sister starts to make some dangerously bad decisions, the two find themselves leaning on each other for support – and looking at each other in a whole new light. Their childhood friendship blossoms in to something more as they deal with their insane families, but as graduation approaches, so does life in the real world, forcing Josie and Mitchell to figure out what, exactly, their relationship is – and if it can survive their very different plans for the future.

Format: ebook Publisher: Blaze Publishing Pages:
Publication: 11th July 2017 Genre: Romance, YA

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

Find Paintbrush on Goodreads

NorthCarolina

Mitchell: They look like a family, huddled in a group, the fading sunlight from the window casting them in a dusty glow. And here I am, close enough but still a few steps back. Enjoying the moment, but not quite part of the group. It’s always this way with me at Paintbrush. I hang around the fringes of every moment. Not because I’m not included or not welcome, but because, sometimes, I’m afraid I’ll get in too deep here. And then I’ll never be able to leave.

Mitchell: “Hi.” I tighten my grip on her waist, and she moves her hand from my shoulder, sliding her fingertips slowly, until they rest on the back of my neck. I close my eyes.           When I open them again, she’s staring at me, her face so close I can see the flecks of brown in her green eyes. It would be so easy to kiss her. Just a few inches. It would be the easiest thing in the world.

Josie: “We’re a mess, aren’t we?” He grins at me. I can’t help it—I lean into him, pressing my shoulder into his, wanting to feel his warmth and his soft sweatshirt, wanting to be a part of that smile. I shrug. “All the best people are messy.”

Josie: Just when I’ve decided to sneak back to my cabin, I see him. Mitchell. He steps right in front of me, a few feet away. I meet his gaze and hold it. And then he jerks his head slightly toward the side and strides off into the night, slipping out into the dark, off into the field behind the Sanctuary. I wait one minute and then follow him.

HannahBucchinAbout the Author

Hannah has spent her life falling in love with beautiful places, both real and fictional. She grew up in charming Bethlehem, PA, went to college in sunny Chapel Hill, NC, spent a summer studying wildlife in Tanzania, volunteered on organic farms across New Zealand, and hiked all over Acadia National Park in Maine. When not writing, reading, or adventuring, she likes to daydream about the dog she’ll adopt someday, listen to music from the sixties, and exchange ridiculous texts with her parents and siblings.

Paintbrush is her first novel.

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Blog Tour/Extract: The Farm Girl’s Dream by Eileen Ramsay

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TheFarmGirl'sDreamBlogTour

I’m delighted to host today’s stop on the blog tour for The Farm Girl’s Dream by Eileen Ramsay. In this new edition, published to coincide with the launch of online saga community Memory Lane, you can find new and exclusive content from Eileen, including recipes featured in the novel for you to make at home, and extracts from forthcoming novels from Eileen. Memory Lane is a place for readers to share memories, photographs and stories from their own families’ history and discover the very best of saga writing from authors old and new.

For a taste of this wonderful family saga, enjoy the extract from The Farm Girl’s Dream below.

Plus, fans of Eileen will be pleased to know that her book, A Pinch Of Salt, is re-released in paperback later this summer.

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TheFarmGirlsDreamAbout the Book

Publisher’s description: In the spring of 1900, Victoria Cameron is born on her absent father’s farm, on the day her namesake, the Queen, turns 81. Victoria thinks her home in Angus is the most beautiful place on earth and she wishes nothing more than to stay on her little farm for ever. But the death of her beloved grandfather leaves her and her mother without a farm and struggling to make ends meet. Never one to give up, Victoria soon finds work in a Dundee mill, while her mother supports them by taking in lodgers. Neither ever expected one of those lodgers would be John Cameron, the father that walked out on them so many years ago. Victoria is torn about how to receive this stranger, and torn about the other man in her life – a young boy she thinks she could love if only he comes back from the war.

Format: Paperback Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre Pages: 352
Publication: 15th June 2017 Genre: Historical Romance

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

Find The Farm Girl’s Dream on Goodreads

Extract: The Farm Girl’s Dream by Eileen Ramsay

To the end of her life, Victoria could recall Grampa as he polished their coats before hitching them up to the carriages, which local children took on their annual Sunday school picnics.

‘That’s it, hen, good lass. Aye, that’s ma own good lass.’

Sometimes he would hoist Victoria up and put her on the broad back of a large horse. She would clutch the mane with her little hands and look down, down from the broad, gleaming shoulders of the horse to the ground so far, so very far below; and she would look into Jock’s whiskered face and she would laugh. Fear? She did not know the meaning of the word, not with Grampa there, with his strong brown hands.

Did the sun always shine in the years before the war? There must have been rain and snow, but Victoria’s memories were full of sun-filled days, days when she would wander out of the farmyard and follow one of the drystane dykes to the burn. There were two stiles between the house and the burn. Years later she could still feel the sense of adventure that she experienced each time she climbed a stile and wandered farther away from her mother. She never went too far, though, for in later years she recalled that she had always been able to see the house.

Her mother worked the whole day long. Everything in the house, including Victoria, was scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Like the linens, Victoria was also starched and ironed.

Mamma baked, preserved, cured and dressed, and in the evenings she sewed and mended, knitted beautiful woollens for the three of them and somehow found time to do exquisite embroidery.

Her day of rest was Sunday, and so Sunday was Victoria’s favourite day of the week. Jock would hitch two of the Clydesdales to the carriage, and everyone, masters and maids, stiff and starched in their Sunday best, would set off for their beautiful little country church.

But it was the time after the traditional huge Sunday midday dinner that Victoria relished. It was then that she and Grampa would escape. For this truancy they had a beautiful little phaeton, which was always pulled by the Scottish Maid, the lightest of the Clydesdales, and off they would go, Grampa in his black frock-coat and hat and the child stiff and starched in her pinafore and best Leghorn hat.

There was not a nook or cranny in Angus that they left undiscovered. The old man was never loquacious, but their silences were companionable. Every now and again he would say, ‘Whoa, maid. Whoa, ma lass,’ and together old man and young child would sit and drink in the view. Wherever it was, there were always trees somewhere in the landscape.

‘Breathe deep, Victoria,’ he would say, ‘there’s no air in the world to match this. It’s a perfect walnut shell day.’

The little girl looked up at him with those clear, grey-blue eyes – Mattie’s eyes. It was bearable to think of them as Mattie’s eyes.

‘What’s a walnut shell day, Grampa?’

‘A day that’s beautiful because you’re with the person you love most in all the world. Everything is so perfect that you want to keep it for ever, so you put it in a walnut shell and save it for the days when nothing is good. Then, my wee Victoria, you take it out and all the joy and peace is there just as you remembered it. Oh, my wee Victoria, is life not hard at times, and does that not make these walnut shell days a’ the mair precious?’

He looked gently down at the much-loved child and knew that she did not really understand.

Momentarily his heart sank – for Jock Cameron knew that, in time, God love her, she would know only too well what he meant.

‘Let there be plenty of walnut shell days for her, Lord,’ he prayed, and for months afterwards he would save walnut shells for Victoria to attempt to fill.

EileenRamsayAbout the Author

Eileen was brought up in the South-West of Scotland. She wrote from the age of seven but decided become a teacher. After graduating she went to teach in the USA for a year – and stayed 18 years. She married Ian Ramsay, a Scottish mathematics scientist working on the first moon shots and they had two children before returning to their native Scotland. Eileen’s writing for children and adults has won several awards, including the Constable and Pitlochry trophies from the Scottish Association of Writers and the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Elizabeth Goudge Award. In 2004 she was short listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year award.

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