Tag: guest post

Blog Tour/Guest Post: The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman

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The Reading Party Blog Tour poster

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Reading Party, the debut novel by Fenella Gentleman.  I’m really looking forward to reading the book but in the meantime I have a wonderful guest post by Fenella about how the germ of an idea during a creative writing exercise was transformed into the subject of her first novel.

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The Reading PartyAbout the Book

It is the seventies and the colleges of Oxford are finally opening their doors to women. Sarah Addleshaw, young, spirited and keen to prove her worth, begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is in fact, her college’s only female Fellow. Impulsive love affairs with people, places and the ideas in her head beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party, that has the most dramatic impact.

Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to one of them, the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings she faces her biggest challenge to date.

Format: Paperback, ebook (304 pp.)    Publisher: Muswell Press
Published: 14th June 2018                      Genre: Literary Fiction

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

Find The Reading Party on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘The Reading Party’ by Fenella Gentleman

Well, this is fun: I’ve never done this before!  One of the great things about being published is getting to know the book blogging world, which is more extensive than I realised, and talking direct to readers and potential readers, who suddenly become real people.  So, a big thank you for this opportunity to do both.

How did I come to write about an Oxford reading party – something so tantalisingly, even infuriatingly, obscure?

Well, I went on one many years ago.  In fact, I went on two reading parties – in my first and third years at university.  It was a batty tradition at my college to invite a group of students for a week of hard work and hard play, in a rambling house on a Cornish cliff top, so they could revise before their exams without getting into a state.  The selection process was opaque, and I was as surprised to be asked on the trip as I was to get into Oxford in the first place.  I thought the whole notion anachronistic, but in the end found it oddly wonderful.

For years afterwards I considered arranging something similar with colleagues or friends, but at the time I couldn’t see how to do it.  Still, it must have stuck in my mind.  When I started writing fiction, I found myself recreating the reading party on paper.

This is where another strand comes in.  I’d been at one of the first male colleges to go mixed, I’d worked briefly for a feminist publishing house, and then I’d spent years amongst the growing number of women trying to hold their own – and often more – in professions dominated by men.  I was fascinated to see how women negotiated their working lives in such unforgiving environments, and particularly how some of them became trailblazers – unintentionally or otherwise.  When I began writing, this theme kept peeping through.

Even so, the real starting point for what became The Reading Party was the central character.  She emerged as a result of a creative writing exercise, in which you had to draft a conversation between two people talking about somebody else.  I imagined a pair of male academics being spiteful about a young female colleague.  This amused people, so I worked her up in a short story in which this woman, at the time called Buttercup and with streaks of blue hair, had to run an Oxford reading party with a tetchy older man.  The feedback was again encouraging, and someone suggested I tackle this scenario in a novel.

I had one big reservation: the connotations of privilege.  So I tried setting my story in a younger university: it lost something.  I sent the students to a rural vicarage: that was too tame.  As for narration, each chapter had the voice of a different student, with a different perspective on this nutty week, but that didn’t work either.

Eventually I realised that the whole point was the archaic set up, and that its oddities could be the source of much tension and humour.  Then things fell into place.  This would be the story of a feisty young woman – a historian with radical ideas – arriving at Oxford in the mid-1970s just when the men’s colleges were beginning to go mixed.  It would be about what might happen if she was asked to host a reading party on the Cornish coast alongside a much older man, and if – against all the strictures about setting a good example – she found herself drawn to someone who was ‘out of bounds’.  She would narrate, betraying the muddled confidence and insecurity of so many women under pressure, but always poking fun at the ridiculous.

I did lots of research – this is not my story and Sarah Addleshaw is not me – but it was easy to imagine myself inside her head and I enjoyed doing so.

Of course a ‘reading party’ doesn’t have to be this rarefied Oxbridge thing.  Nowadays I hold my own version every year with a bunch of girlfriends: we have a ball.  All you need is a place to go, a mix of people, a good book, and some food and drink.  Anyone can be part of that.  I’d love there to be reading parties all over the place!

© Fenella Gentleman, 2018

Fenella GentlemanAbout the Author

Fenella Gentleman studied PPE at Wadham College, Oxford, when it went mixed. She participated in two reading parties in Cornwall. After graduating she worked in publishing, before moving into marketing and communications in the professions. She lives in London and North Norfolk.

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Guest Post: ‘Researching The Great Darkness’ by Jim Kelly

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I read The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it.  Set in Cambridge in 1939, The Great Darkness is the first in a new historical crime series.  You can read my full review here but, if you need a little enticement, I commented that the book would be perfect for fans of TV’s Foyles War.  Since I loved the book so much, I’m thrilled to welcome Jim Kelly to What Cathy Read Next today.  Below you can read a fabulous guest post from Jim all about his research for the book.

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The Great Darkness CoverAbout the Book

1939, Cambridge: The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout – The Great Darkness – covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam.   The night is full of alarms but, in this Phoney War, the enemy never comes.

Daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force. Brooke investigates, calling on the expertise and inspiration of a faithful group of fellow ‘nighthawks’ across the city, all condemned, like him, to a life lived away from the light. Within hours The Great Darkness has claimed a second victim.

War, it seems, has many victims, but what links these crimes of the night?

Format: ebook, hardcover (352 pp.)  Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 19th April 2018                   Genre: Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Crime

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

Find The Great Darkness on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Researching The Great Darkness’ by Jim Kelly

Writing a novel set in a historical period is daunting. I always swore I would never do it. Ever. And in a strange way I’ve kept my promise, because The Great Darkness, set in the opening months of the Second World War in Cambridge, isn’t a historical novel in my mind. Let me explain.

Someone wise once said that history is what happened before your parents were born. If that definition stands the so-called test of time – which I think it does – then The Great Darkness is just a crime novel.

My father was a commando in the Second World War, my mum worked in the City of London during the blitz, my brother was born in the war. I came along twelve years after it ended in victory. So it’s just the world I was born into to, the big event I just missed, and heard talked about, for most of my early life. So when people ask how I prepared to write the book my first reaction is simple: “I didn’t prepare. It’s in my head already.”

But that’s not the whole truth. Writing about the past is like writing about anything else, you need detail, an insight into the ways things looked, smelt, tasted, and felt. It’s no good reading history books for this sort of detail.  Such books – and I have read many on the period because I love history – will give me the big facts; for example, that meat rationing began with bacon, butter and sugar on January 8, 1940. But what did sausages taste like?  Did butchers give more to their friends? Which shops had queues outside? How could you spot the Black Market? This kind of detail is much more difficult to find.

One good source is newspapers, especially local ones. I was very lucky because a historian in Cambridge has produced an online resource in which he summarised all the interesting stories in the Cambridge News for the whole war. These priceless abstracts give you the real minutiae of daily life. Another good way to ‘dig down’ into the past is diaries. Again, I was fortunate; I found an excellent war time diary by a conscientious objector called Jack Overton. He told me what it felt like to be in Cambridge when the air raid siren sounded, what the bombs falling sounded like when they struck.  This kind of background gives you a depth of information which feels like knowledge to the reader, not research. Any reader can tell the difference.

Lastly, my third major source was old photographs. These show you all the detail you’d never get in the printed word. A huge wall of sandbags outside the local police station, white lines on the curbs to help in the black out, the stained glass windows of a church removed to safety and replaced by boards. The central library in Cambridge has a first-class collection of such material, The Cambridgeshire Collection, and they produced boxes of pictures for me to see – and – another excellent resource – a map of the city in 1940.

There was a final twist in my preparation for writing the book. Someone – Napoleon I think – said that to understand a man (or a woman, I think we could add) you have to understand the world when he was twenty years of age. This is a good approach to building a character. What were the events which formed him – or her? My hero – Detective Inspector Eden Brooke – is about forty years old when the book starts. So he’d have been twenty in 1920 – so old enough to serve in the First World War.

Again, I knew a little, from books and films. But the great thing is to avoid cliché. So not the trenches, not the Western Front, but something unusual which I could research in a more traditional way. I think it is a good rule to narrow research down, and don’t try to understand too much. So I chose the desert war, which led me to Lawrence of Arabia, and the march from Cairo to Jerusalem.  A forgotten war then, but not now, because it was this campaign which led to the formation of the Middle East as we know it today. I read as much as I could, looked at photographs, and focused on a single event: the Second Battle of Gaza. It was here Eden Brooke’s story really began, because he was captured, and tortured, and this is the man we meet twenty years later.

The book’s out now and people have been very kind. I don’t mind readers spotting errors. I keep a list so that we can put them right when we get to later editions. So far there’s only two, which I am very proud are minor.  I have a Lancaster bomber flying overhead – but they didn’t fly until 1941. And I have a character saying, “Same old, same old” – apparently a phrase which came out of the Korean War.

If that’s the final tally, I’ll be very happy.                            © Jim Kelly

Jim KellyAbout the Author

Jim Kelly was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective.  He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and was education correspondent for the Financial Times.   His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature.  He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

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