16th Apr 2019 – White Tulip

I’m very pleased and excited to show the COVER of Joanna Stephen Ward’s new novel – Searching For Sylvia….but first a little info…..

PUBLISHERS BLURB

Sylvia has been missing for thirty years. Will her daughters ever find her?
Tordorrach is 70,000 acres of drought stricken land in the Australian outback. Why do a group of wealthy people from London want to buy it?

Shamus, the owner of Tordorrach, lives in poverty. His homestead is derelict and he is heavily in debt. The new owners run Outback Experience holidays on Tordorrach. Shamus becomes one of the gardeners, and he and his wife Mary move to a comfortable cabin on the property. Why does he hate the new owners so much that he plans to murder one of them?

The idyllic life of the new owners is shattered when the body of a woman is found buried on Tordorrach. Forensics find a bullet in her body. Who was she? And who murdered her?

NEARLY THERE……

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanna Stephen-Ward was born in the Australian outback, and grew up in Melbourne. Her school days were spent dreaming about being an opera singer or a writer. To the exasperation of her parents and teachers she spent her final year sitting at the back of the classroom writing a novel set in WW2.

When she left school she went to an opera school where she was taught drama, movement and language pronunciation and had small roles in the workshop productions. She was not good enough to become a professional opera singer, but the seeds of her novel Vissi d’arte were sown.

She left Australia and spent a year travelling around Europe and the UK. While working in outpatients for the NHS she met Peter and they married in 1985. They lived in Richmond Surrey and she worked at The National Archives, an enthralling place for anyone interested in history or crime.

Having been brought up as a lonely only child, she was astonished to discover in 2010 that she was one of eight children. She and her sister had last been together on a verandah in the outback when they were babies. They had a joyous reunion in Cornwall in 2012.

Joanna has written seven novels and is working on her eighth.

AND FINALLY…..HERE IT IS IN ALL ITS GLORY ……

91633198-35B9-481E-BCD9-DC6EBE0C0F9A Author Links :

https://www.facebook.com/joanna.stephenward

https://twitter.com/OperaLover12

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/28527503

https://outbackwriter.blogspot.com

PUBLISHERS BLURB

An exquisite and original take on the family saga, from the PEN Ackerley Prize-winning Alice Jolly

Coventry, 1941. The morning after one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Twenty-two-year-old Rose enters the remains of a bombed house to find her best friend dead. Shocked and confused, she makes a split-second decision that will reverberate for generations to come.

More than fifty years later, in modern-day Brighton, Rose’s granddaughter Lara waits for the return of her eighteen-year-old son Jay. Reckless and idealistic, he has gone to Iraq to stand on a conflict line as an unarmed witness to peace.

Lara holds her parents, Mollie and Rufus, partly responsible for Jay’s departure. But in her attempts to explain their thwarted passions, she finds all her assumptions about her own life are called into question.

Then into this damaged family come two strangers – Oliver, a former faith healer, and Jemmy, a young woman devastated by the loss of a baby. Together they help to establish a partial peace – but at what cost?

MY REVIEW

This starts with the aftermath of a bombing raid on Coventry in April 1941….Rose is bewildered and traumatised by the devastation around her, she’s carrying her daughter Mollie, barely able to take it all in. She is trying to get to her friend Violet and her daughter, also called Mollie…..she then makes a decision which will affect the rest of her life…

Told from the different perspectives of several characters over 4 decades, easy to follow and builds a fascinating insight to all of them and their lives.

“Jay made his choices, they all did and what’s happened is due to the squalid little mistakes and petty grievances of their lives”

Alice Jolly has written a hypnotic, beautiful tale of family and the consequences of our actions on ourselves and those close to us. There are some of the most honest, brutal and emotional moments that will make you gasp, cry and want to hug those close to you….a masterpiece of writing and a modern classic in the making……I’m certain book clubs everywhere will love it as much as I do.

Thank you to Anne Cater and Random Things Tours for the opportunity to participate in this blog tour and for the promotional materials and a free copy of the ebook in exchange for my honest, unbiased review.

YOU CAN BUY A COPY HERE…..(click on the image)

About the author

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns won the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016. She also won the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature in 2014 for one of her short stories, ‘Ray the Rottweiler’. She has published three novels previously, What the Eye Doesn’t
See, If Only You Knew and Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile. She has also written for the Guardian, Mail on Sunday and the Independent, and broadcast for Radio 4. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
@jollyalice

Alice Jolly is the PEN Ackerley Prize-winning author of the memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns.

Alice’s remarkable 2018 novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was described by Sally Bayley as ‘an exquisite piece of craft … I would place it among the classics of this century and the last’.

For fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, Rose Tremain, Helen Dunmore, Shirley Hazzard, Pat Barker.

REVIEW QUOTES, PREVIOUS BOOKS
For Dead Babies and Seaside Towns:
‘Her account is astonishingly moving and her prose nothing short of hypnotic’ Independent ‘Beautifully written and brutally honest’ Sunday Times

‘The miracle is that this powerfully written book is not only bearable but compulsively readable’ Financial Times

Book details
18 APRIL 2019
PRICE: £8.99
ISBN: 978-1-78352-499-0 FORMAT: Paperback
BINDING: B Format PB EXTENT: 496 pages SIZE: 198 × 129 mm CATEGORY BIC: FA