Tag: historical fiction

Blog Tour/Q&A: The Runaway Wife by Rosie Clarke

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The Runaway Wife - Blog Tour banner

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Rosie Clarke’s latest historical novel, The Runaway Wife.  Rosie is pretty much an unstoppable force when it comes to writing, having written around 100 books under different pen names.  Therefore, I’m so pleased she’s taken a temporary break to give us an insight into how she comes up with the ideas for her books and how she lets her characters tell their stories.

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THE RUNAWAY WIFE COVERAbout the Book

Love, marriage, obsession, betrayal and treachery in 1920s London –  a powerful and gritty saga perfect for fans of Kitty Neale, Josephine Cox and Rosie Goodwin.

The hedonism of London in the roaring ’20s is a world away from Annabel Tarleton’s ordinary country existence. Until a chance meeting with the charming Richard Fortescue at a society ball changes her life for ever. Swept off her feet by the dashing Richard, and his renowned fortune, Annabel soon realises that all that glitters isn’t gold. Her bid for freedom has come at a terrible price and she finds herself trapped inside a marriage that behind closed doors is cruel and brutal.

Annabel has no choice but to flee, and will do everything to save herself, and her unborn baby, from destitution. But the very rich and very powerful expect to get what they want – and Richard wants only one thing – Annabel…

Format: ebook (255 pp.)                    Publisher: Aria Fiction
Published: 1st February 2018          Genre: Historical Fiction

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

Find The Runaway Wife on Goodreads

Interview with Rosie Clarke, author of The Runaway Wife

Without giving too much away, can you tell me a bit about The Runaway Wife?

Annabel is her mother’s daughter.  Taught to expect to marry well and to be a credit to her name, but that isn’t the reason she allows her mother to bully her.  Underneath her meekness, Annabel is brave and she seeks to protect those she loves: her younger sister and her brother, who is older but has to carry so much of the burden of a struggling estate and his mother’s displeasure.  When she is finally pushed into a marriage with a man who is as cruel as he is rich, a girl like that will break all the rules.

What was the inspiration for the book?

I never know why I write a particular book.  Usually there isn’t any particular reference point that turns a light bulb on and makes me think I’ll write about this or that.  However, things drip feed into your subconscious and perhaps I’d been watching or reading about abusive men.  I wanted a story that I could connect up with Jessie’s Promise without being a sequel to her story and Annabel just suddenly took root.  Once her mother started nagging I knew she had to make an unhappy marriage and Richard immediately strutted centre stage.  He was so damned sure of himself and so careless of others that I knew he had to be really nasty.

The book involves the portrayal of an abusive marriage.  Were there scenes you found difficult to write?

No, I enjoyed writing them.  Once I’m into Annabel’s character I’m feeling her misery and I wanted to hit back so I needed to really feel how she felt.  It was so difficult for her to think of actually walking out of her marriage so she tried other methods first until she understood that he might kill her in one of his rages and then she had to go.

How did you approach the research for the book? Do you enjoy the process of research?

I don’t do hours and hours of research.  I did this once for a period I didn’t know and it came out like a history lesson and I had to rewrite the whole thing.  I always know a bit about what I am writing and then when I need specific details I research that in books, internet and watch TV programmes set in the period if I can.  Watching the period you need is great, though it only gives you the feel and you still have to research dates and details.

The Runaway Wife is set in the 1920s. What do you think is the key to creating an authentic picture of a particular historical period?

First ask your characters to come and once they do you know where they belong.  All my books are character led and then I paint a picture in words of their surroundings.  Annabel is very much a young woman of the thirties, smart, intelligent but still chained by her mother’s old-fashioned ideas and strictures.  Only when she breaks free from her mother’s domination can she be herself. So once you know that you research that period and blend it into the story.

All your books are set in the first half of the 20th century.  What is it that attracts you to this period?

For my sagas I tend to write mostly about the period I know more about but I’ve also written other periods under other names, historical, twenties, all sorts.

You’ve written over one hundred books under a number of different pen names.  Where do you get all your ideas?

It is like a train station.  I have to use the signals to keep some of them waiting while the others are in the station.  New ideas come all the time.  [Cathy: I love that way of describing it!]

Do you have a special place to write or any writing rituals?

I have my study, which has all my printers, computers and books together and is very comfortable.

Which other writers do you admire or enjoy reading?

Oh, so many.  I love Georgette Heyer but I also love Matthew Harffy’s work, which is Saxons fighting in early Britain.  I’m just reading a good Viking trilogy, and I also enjoy Sarah Flint’s thrillers.  I like family sagas, though I try not to read these all the time because I don’t want to cross threads with my own work.

What are you working on next?

At the moment I’ve just started a standalone Christmas book but I am also thinking about the next in the Mulberry Lane series.  Thank you for having me on your blog and I hope your readers enjoy my answers, and try my books.

Clarke_RosieAbout the Author

Rosie Clarke was born in Swindon, but moved to Ely in Cambridgeshire at the age of nine. She started writing in 1976, combining this with helping her husband run his antiques shop. In 2004, Rosie was the well-deserved winner of the RNA Romance Award and the Betty Neels Trophy.

Rosie also writes as Anne Herries and Cathy Sharp.

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Extract: The Circumstantial Enemy by John R. Bell

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When an author contacts you about reviewing their book, it’s disappointing to have to decline the opportunity because of your already huge review pile.  Such is the case when John R. Bell contacted me about his historical fiction novel, The Circumstantial Enemy.    However, just because my review pile is approaching mountainous proportions doesn’t mean I should hide interesting sounding books from followers of my blog.

You can read an excerpt from The Circumstantial Enemy further down this post and, if it sparks your interest, you can find the relevant purchase links below.

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The Circumstantial EnemyAbout the Book

The Circumstantial Enemy chronicles the trials and capers of a young Croat pilot who finds himself forcibly aligned with Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Unbeknownst to the hero, his sweetheart and best friend have taken the side of the opposing communist partisans. The threesome soon discovers that love and friendship cannot circumvent the ideals of this war. Downed in the Adriatic Sea, the protagonist survives a harrowing convalescence in deplorable Italian hospitals and North African detention stockades. His next destination is a POW camp on American soil. With the demise of the Third Reich, repatriation presents his next challenge. What kind of life awaits him under communist rule? Will he be persecuted as an enemy of the state? And then there is his sweetheart; in letters she confesses her love, but not her deceit… Does her heart still belong to him?

Based on a true story, The Circumstantial Enemy is an energetic journey to freedom through minefields of hatred, betrayal, lust and revenge. Rich in incident with interludes of rollicking humour, it’s a story about the strength of the human spirit, and the power of friendship, love and forgiveness.

Format: eBook (326 pp.)                   Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 12th October 2017          Genre: Historical Fiction

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

Find The Circumstantial Enemy on Goodreads

Extract from The Circumstantial Enemy by John R. Bell

For Tony, the past days had been hazy. How long since they pulled him from the sea? And that Red Cross nurse that changed his dressings – fancy thinking she was Katarina. It must have been the morphine. The mind was playing him up. Could the dead man next to him on the floor boards of the rescue boat also have been an apparition?

Four days at Bari, and Tony was transported to the Santa Marta POW hospital in Catania, Sicily, where authorities either hadn’t read the Geneva Convention’s medical code of conduct, chose to ignore it, or simply were overwhelmed by the task of treating so many with so little. Hygiene was appalling, food and fresh gauze scarce, and staff levels low. Add to that a rash of malaria spread by mosquitoes from the marshlands which had left a trail of dead POWs and sick medics. Prisoners changed their own bandages, applied ointments, and scrounged chow. Infection, not wounds became the killer.

The cots in Tony’s ward were so close together that the wider nurses had to sidle between them to treat the patients. Now that it was October, the ward’s four windows remained closed to retain heat. They also retained the stench of excrement, urine, body odour, ammonia, and infection. Tony wasn’t sure which was worse – shivering in the cold, clean air or retching from the foulness he breathed.

The muscles of his swollen left leg had atrophied, and the puffiness encasing the knee had yet to recede. A young doctor, reputedly the best of an exhausted lot, eventually took out the slug, removed the dead tissue, and ordered that the gash be left without sutures or bandage in the hope that bleeding from an exposed wound would cleanse it.

But the bleeding stopped, and the skin surrounding the incision became red and feverish. By morning, red streaks ran beyond the swelling zone, and a yellow discharge collected inside the opening. The smell made Tony gag. A dutiful nurse swabbed the pus with antiseptic, but her efforts were futile – the tissue was rotting.

If the infection wasn’t stamped out, gangrene would take the leg. Tony’s body had rejected the antibiotic sulfa drugs. Penicillin was the answer, but an army short on the miracle drug would not waste it on the enemy. Santa Marta hadn’t seen a new vial in two weeks.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of morphine. A generous shot lulled Tony to sleep, but by three in the morning, chills, fever, and an entourage of dead men disrupted his slumber. The young Messerschmitt pilot he’d killed over Belgrade and the lanky red-haired fisherman from Korcula stood watch at his bedside, and in a crescent behind them, Major Kirilenko and all the others he’d met along the deadly way.

The delirium lasted three days. It was a tingling that startled him awake. The throb in the leg was gone, but what the hell was that itch? The knee felt as if it were hooked to a hundred hairline strands of low-voltage current. He started to shake. Was this how it felt? Christ, no! The bastards had promised not to amputate. He’d given countless warnings, but the staff made it clear he may have to trade the leg for his life. Tony had said he wouldn’t make that trade.

He couldn’t bring himself to raise his head and look. So instead, he studied the map of russet stains in the ceiling, following the contours as if the water lines were the shores of Dalmatian islands on the Adriatic Sea. He traced every cove, isthmus, and peninsula connected by dust-laden cobwebs draping the dangling light bulbs.

Damn itching.

Perspiration from his chest trickled down the furrow of his abdominal muscles to his navel. Let there be two. He squinted down his sopping chest. The bedsheet tented at the end of the cot. Wiggle them. The tent moved where his right foot should be. To see the left, he would have to sit up.

“Jesus Christ! Help! Help me-e-e-e-e-e-e!”

The man in the next cot asked what was wrong.

“Get them off! Get them off me!” Dozens of cream-colored maggots slithered and squirmed in the flesh in and around the uncovered wound. Tony whipped his head to his left and a stream of vomit splattered the floor and the legs of the next cot.

“Those grubs,” said his roommate, “are your best chance of saving that leg. They love rotting flesh – won’t bother with the healthy stuff. Feed them well.”

John R BellAbout the Author

John Richard Bell was born in Chigwell, UK and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. Before becoming an author of business books and historical fiction, he was the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a global strategy consultant. A prolific blogger, John’s musings on strategy, leadership and branding have appeared in various journals such as Fortune, Forbes and ceoafterlife.com

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