Lost memories. Lost loves. Can they find their way back to each other?
When Will wakes up after a car accident, he’s lost three years of memory. All he wants is his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart, Gem, beside him. Instead, nothing is as he remembers.
Gem has finally moved on from hers and Will’s break-up. With a new life and boyfriend, the last thing she expects is a call to say Will needs her – the man who nearly destroyed her.
As Will recovers, he is determined to prove to Gem that he is the man he once was. But by unlocking the secrets of his past, will he be able to piece together what caused him to change so dramatically? And, faced with the choice, will Gem continue with the safe new life she has built for herself, or will she go back to the man she used to love?
Heartbreaking and twisty, perfect for fans of Dani Atkins, Jojo Moyes and Colleen Hoover.
Author Bio – Eve Ainsworth is a public speaker, creative workshop coordinator and award-winning author who draws from her extensive work with teenagers managing emotional and behavioural issues to write authentic, honest and real novels for young people and adults. Eve’s adult debut, Duckling, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. She has had short stories published in magazines such as Writers’ Forum and Prima and articles posted online for The Guardian, Metro and BookTrust. Eve is also a champion for working class voices, has set up the Working Class Writers Network and is an experienced mentor.
On the peaceful Japanese island of Teshima there is Shinzo¯-on no A¯kaibu, a library of heartbeats, a place where the heartbeats of visitors from all around the world are collected. In this small, isolated building, the heartbeats of people who are still alive or have already passed away continue to echo. Several miles away, in the ancient city of Kamakura, two lonely souls meet: Shuichi, a forty-year-old illustrator, who returns to his home-town to fix up the house of his recently deceased mother, and eight-year-old Kenta, a child who wanders like a shadow around Shuichi’s house. Day by day, the trust between Shuichi and Kenta grows until they discover they share a bond that will tie them together for life. Their journey will lead them to Teshima and to the library of heartbeats . . .
Laura Imai Messina (Author) Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome and moved to Tokyo at the age of 23. Her international bestselling novel The Phone Box at the Edge of the World was published in 31 countries. Laura teaches at some of the most prestigious Japanese universities, as well as writing for newspapers and working with the Japanese National TV Channel NHK.
Lucy Rand (Translator) Lucy Rand was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize for The Phone Box at the Edge of the World which she translated while living in Japan. She has also translated novels by Italian authors Paolo Milone and Irene Graziosi, and is the editor of the guided audiobook app, Audrey. She now lives in Norwich.
My thoughts: a gentle story of love and friendship as Shuichi and Kenta navigate their shared losses and new found friendship. As the trust between the man and boy grows, they take several adventures but their greatest one will take them to a small island where the Library of Heartbeats lives, and they will find healing and peace in the recordings of heartbeats from around the globe.
Moving and tender, this felt like a lovely hug from a friend, from the author of The Telephone Box at the End of the World, another book that navigates loss and how to live after it. While it’s slow pace and lack of conflict might not suit some readers, I found it charming and kindly. The characters are well drawn and while lost slightly, through coming together find themselves and can begin to truly live again.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
Married couple Karin and Kai are looking for a pleasant escape from their busy lives, and reluctantly accept an offer to stay in a luxurious holiday home in the Norwegian fjords.
Instead of finding a relaxing retreat, however, their trip becomes a reminder of everything lacking in their own lives, and in a lessthan-friendly meeting with their new neighbours, Karin tells a little white lie…
Against the backdrop of the glistening water and within the claustrophobic walls of the ultra-modern house, Karin’s insecurities blossom, and her lie grows ever bigger, entangling her and her husband in a nightmare spiral of deceits with absolutely no means of escape…
Agnes Ravatn is a Norwegian author and columnist. She made her literary début with the novel Week 53 in 2007. Since then she has written a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning essay collections, including Standing, Popular Reading and Operation Self-discipline, in which she recounts her experience with social-media addiction.
Her debut thriller, The Bird Tribunal, won the cultural radio P2’s listener’s prize in addition to The Youth’s Critic’s Prize, and was made into a successful play in Oslo in 2015. The English translation, published by Orenda Books in 2016, was a WHSmith Fresh Talent Pick, winner of a PEN Translation Award, a BBC Radio Four ‘Book at Bedtime’ and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Critically acclaimed The Seven Doors was published in 2020.
Agnes lives with her family in the Norwegian countryside.
My thoughts: a perfect example of why you shouldn’t tell lies, as Karin’s spiral out of control and she ends up with serious egg on her face.
Staying in an old school friend’s holiday cabin on the coast, an old school friend she can’t stand and is still seriously jealous of, she has an awkward encounter with the neighbours. Instead of introducing themselves as guests, she tells the neighbour, a novelist she recognised, that they own the cabin and then starts to expand. A dinner invitation means that she, and husband Kai, have to keep lying.
Or they could come clean. But as the two writers next door never mention that they know the cabin’s owners, Karin assumes they’re in the clear, that her lies about being an entrepreneur and an investment banker are working, when actually their real jobs in the planning office and as a joiner, would have been of more interest to the neighbours.
The ending made me laugh out loud – never tell unnecessary lies, you end up looking very, very foolish.
A great fun read, full of humour and clever little moments.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website https://www.bbnya.com/ or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
Sometimes it’s the family you can’t choose who are the ones to save you.
un·sound /ˌənˈsound/ adjective not safe or robust; in poor condition. not based on sound evidence or reasoning and therefore unreliable or unacceptable not competent, reliable, or holding acceptable views.
As I watched the rich Washington landscape of mountains and thick green forests, I didn’t know what to expect. Granted, I was watching it from the back of a squad car, so it’s not like I had a choice in the matter.
High school is hard enough—dealing with hormones, grades, the pressure of college, social media, prom, sex ed… the list can go on forever. I wished for that kind of normalcy. Instead, I was being shipped way up to the middle of nowhere woods of Washington state—a serene community of cozy cabins, the smell of burning firewood… and enough troubled, drug-addicted, almost-criminal teens to make me wonder if this was a better option than juvie.
Little did I know that these drug-addled, societal misfits were exactly what I needed to become myself again.
Written in four cohesive POV’s, Unsound follows a tight-knit group of troubled teenagers living at a boarding school for at-risk youths up in a remote forest in Washington State. These kids have had childhood ripped away from them but they’re on the journey to take their lives back.
345 page standalone with a sequel is in the works!
But no cliffhangers, because who really likes a cliffhanger!?
There are TRIGGER WARNINGS ranging from mental abuse, eating disorders and depression to underage drug & alcohol use, underage sex and mentions of rape. But I promise, it’s not as dark as the warning sounds.
I’m an author in Brooklyn, trying to promote my first book Unsound. Unsound is a 20+ year project and I’m so proud of where it is now from where it was in 1999 coming out of a 14-year-old brain.
I love Manhattan. I love my cat. I have the best boyfriend in the world who tries not to show his frustration when I want to write and therefore need to ignore him for hours.
I love music, my latest obsessions being Bastille, 21 Pilots, Old Dominion, Dan+Shay, and AJR. I love having the radio play all day long in the background. I love old school WB: Buffy, Dawson’s Creek, Charmed, just to name a few.
And most importantly, I’m constantly reading. After all, Stephen King said: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
Besides the sequel to Unsound, I’m also working on a new project that is fantasy based.
When it comes to families, is anyone a reliable witness?
Cherry Magraw can never forget the date her mother and brother were killed – the night of her ninth birthday. When her father was jailed for their murders, she lost everyone she loved.
Twenty years later, Cherry is a freelance journalist investigating domestic abuse and the secret world of the family courts, when she gets a letter from her father – still in prison for the killings – which contains a startling request.
From that point on, her past becomes entangled with her work, dismantling everything Cherry thought she knew about her family tragedy and plunging her into a dangerous of game of cat and mouse. Will her history cloud her judgement about another desperate family? And how far will she go to save someone else’s children?
If you buy a copy direct from the publisher, there’s a free shipping offer with code XMASFREE. The first chapter is also available on the Bath Publishing website to give you a taste of the book.
My thoughts: based on her experience as a journalist covering family court, Louise Tickle has written a complex and thought provoking book.
Cherry is now a journalist with an interest in domestic violence cases and family court, but as a child she was present when her father killed her mother and younger brother after a night of terror. He also scarred her for life. He is in prison but Cherry has gaps in her memory of that night and he might be the only person who can help her fill them.
She has also been drawn into the fraught custody case of Kathie and Ed. She claims he’s a master manipulator, using threats, physical violence and coercive control to stop her from escaping him with their two young children. He says she’s a liar.
With an unsympathetic judge who doesn’t seem to really care, Kathie grows more and more frantic, and despite promising to stay neutral Cherry’s own experiences colour her reactions and after a frightening moment with Ed, she’s more concerned than ever. But there’s no evidence that he’s dangerous.
Domestic cases are always very complicated, a lot of what happens is in the home with no witnesses, except maybe the children, and it can be difficult to demonstrate what has been going on.
There are lots of shocking moments and heartstopping twists as the novel builds towards its ending – played out against the North Wales coastline where Cherry grew up in the care of her loving aunt and uncle.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website https://www.bbnya.com/ or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
Seventeen-year-old Lucas Rowland is spending the summer with his family at the exclusive Lake Avalon, and things are getting… weird. His wealthy peers welcome him and his younger sister Fay with seemingly open arms, and by the time Lucas discovers why, Fay is already fully enmeshed in both high—and questionable—society. But does she need saving? Or is it all a harmless game? Lucas must decide whether to play along or put a stop to it.
Amanda Innes is the award-winning author of THE GHOSTS OF MARSHLEY PARK and the popular Drew & Rayze series. Find her on YouTube at https://youtube.com/@mplbooks and on TikTok as Amanda_Innes.
On the night that Trudy Asp discovers her ex is engaged to the same dental hygienist who’s been picking at her teeth for ten years, her daughter, Madison, suddenly announces that she too is getting married, in Europe.
Frumpy, floundering, and forced to live with her martini-swilling mother, Trudy is swamped by these revelations. And on top of it all, she’ll be wearing the second most scrutinized gown at the wedding.
Having packed on the pounds during the demise of her marriage, the idea of being eyeballed by her ex and his scrawny fiancée Zelda, is truly horrifying. To make matters worse, there’s the paralyzing fear of a transatlantic flight — something Trudy has avoided for decades.
When Zelda offers to stand in for her, Trudy is forced to confront the forces that stole her marriage and threaten to steal her daughter’s wedding too. With three months until the ceremony, Trudy must get to Europe, squeeze herself into a gown, and claim the role she wants more than anything: Mother-of-the-Bride.
Will this Odd Mom Out sink or swim? Or will she drown in a sea of humiliation?
Pre-order Links
Publication Date: 1st January 2024
Author Bio –
Sandy Day is a recovering chatterbox and writer of riveting slice-of-life poetry, memoir, and fiction. She has authored five books to date, with two in the works. A graduate of Glendon College, she studied creative writing under Michael Ondaatje and bp nichol. A lover of cheese, coffee shops, and illustrations, she lives on the shore of Lake Simcoe in Georgina, Ontario, Canada. You can find and follow her on Substack and sandyday.ca – it rhymes!
This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 15 finalists and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA Website https://www.bbnya.com/ or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
Fate can conspire to put two people in the exact right place at the exact right time. And just as easily it can tear them apart.
As winter turns to spring on the North Cornish coast, Kerensa O’Connell receives an unexpected message relating to a passionate relationship from deep in her past. A message which stirs up vivid memories, and threatens to derail the comfortable life she has created for herself after years of drifting.
While the world is forced to press the pause button, Kerensa battles both mental and physical health issues and has no choice but to slow down and confront the demons that have plagued her throughout her life.
Simultaneously unfolding over a few months and several decades, the story moves from the windswept plains of East Africa to the stunning islands of the Great Barrier Reef, the tranquil mountains of the Himalayas, and the bustling cities of Europe. Kerensa confronts happiness and heartbreak through the lens of her camera and her connection to the people she loves. Piecing together her memories of love, loss, and adventure, she starts to make sense of the choices she has made and question the internal chaos that has always defined her.
Finally the secret she has been kept buried for years comes to light and Kerensa must decide once and for all what she is looking for from life and whom she wants by her side.
An unforgettable love story about wanderlust, heartbreak and colliding life paths.
A lyrical meditation on the importance of our memories and a reminder that sometimes, letting go of the past can take a whole lifetime.
Siobhan Murphy a contemporary women’s fiction writer based in the UK. Over the years she’s drifted around the world in search of adventure, hoping to figure out what to do with her life. She is not sure if she’s found the answers, but loves to learn and has always wanted to write books.
As an impulsive and easily bored individual with hundreds of ideas spinning around her brain on any given day, she has turned her hand to many jobs over the years. Her favourite job was as a bookseller for Waterstones, recommending books to customers and applying those 3 for 2 stickers that people find so hard to remove. For the last 17 years she has been a professional photographer, taking portraits of humans – often the really, really small ones.
She is unable to use 3 words where 300 will do and suffers from a condition called Pareidolia, which causes her to see faces in everyday objects. Her hobbies include eating sweets, talking nonsense and walking into rooms wondering why she is there. She overthinks everything so will no doubt keep deleting and re-writing this bio for the forseeable future.
Set in Sydney, Australia, Courting Samira is a charming and frothy romantic comedy about a twentyseven-year-old Palestinian woman who finds herself in an unexpected love triangle—a sparkling ode to meddling best friends, traditional courtship, The Princess Bride, and, of course, the possibility of love.
Coming from a moderately traditional Muslim family, twenty-seven-year-old Samira Abdel-Aziz has endured her fair share of arranged matches—first dates she calls “doorknock appeals,” where she and her possible suitors eat snacks in her living room in the company of both sets of parents. Her general rule: no shoes with tassels, no cheesy leather jackets, no mustaches. A girl has to have some standards, right? The truth is, Samira is already experiencing enough wedding drama as an assistant at Bridal Bazaar magazine and as a gofer for her soon-to-be-married cousin and nemesis Zahra. She’s not sure she needs to add any of her own.
When she meets the charismatic Menem at a work retreat, Samira finds herself intrigued. But her best friend Lara insists Menem isn’t right for her, and now her childhood friend Hakeem has begun behaving oddly. Adding to the confusion, Samira is seeking a promotion at work, yet isn’t sure it’s the job of her dreams. Suddenly, her life is full of drama and complications, and she realizes that part of growing up is making difficult choices about what—and whom—she really wants.
Amal Awad is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. She has written for Elle, The Guardian, and other publications and held senior editorial roles at a number of trade media publications. She has spoken at schools, universities, and writers’ festivals around Australia, and she facilitates workshops on diversity, multiculturalism, women’s issues, and pop culture. Amal is the author of eight books, including four novels— Courting Samira, This is How You Get Better, The Things We See in the Light, and Bitter & Sweet—and the nonfiction books The Incidental Muslim, Beyond Veiled Clichés, Fridays With My Folks, and In My Past Life I was Cleopatra. Courting Samira is the first of her books to be published in America.
My thoughts: Samira reminded me of some of my friends and their sisters, bound by tradition and family. She’s a 21st century woman determined to make more of her life than just as a wife and mother. She thinks she wants to be a journalist or perhaps a photographer. But she does also want to find the one – it’s just not so easy when you’re Muslim.
After a string of “door knock” disasters – hello Manga Boy – she’s fed up. Then she meets Menem at work and suddenly there’s a possibility. His brother is getting married to her bitchy cousin Zahra – which means lots of rushing around but also the potential for more meetings. If she can get best friend (and another cousin) Lara onside.
When Samira decides what she wants, from her career, from love, there’s nothing that can stop her. A funny, charming and delightful read with an equally entertaining protagonist.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
Englishman Paul West is living in Paris (where he arrived long before Emily, by the way) and he’s gearing up for the 2024 Olympics. Paul accepts a job with a French group who are campaigning to get pétanque adopted as an official Olympic event. In Paul’s opinion, lobbing lumps of lead around while drinking pastis is barely a sport – it’s more an excuse for Provençal men to avoid cooking dinner. But he needs the cash. Meanwhile Paul falls in love with a French tech genius – who thinks he’s an idiot – and tangles with his treacherous ex, Elodie. Paul also applies for French nationality and has to embark on a war of attrition with France’s Napoleonic bureaucrats. In the background, Paul’s friend Jake the grunge poet decides that the Olympics and Paralympics discriminate against the lazy, and invents the “Nolympics”. Let the fun and games begin.
Stephen Clarke is a British writer who writes mainly about France. He has published six novels featuring a British protagonist named Paul West.
My thoughts: this was very funny, I’ve played petanque in the beach in France as a kid, my family are all Francophiles and my great-grandmother was French. I have also been to Paris, which is very different to other parts of France, so I appreciated Paul’s constant bewilderment despite having lived there for some time.
French bureaucracy is infamous and he encounters it both in attempting to get citizenship and in trying to get petanque (sometimes known as boules) registered as an Olympic sport for the Paris Olympics in 2024. Although Olympic bureaucracy might actually be even more impressively labyrinthine than the French.
For Paul, it means tangling with ex-girlfriend Eloise, while attempting to impress solar panel entrepreneur Ambre, translate for a rather rude Provencàl petanque association president, in an attempt to not offend every Olympic official, and avoid being associated too closely with Eloise’s right wing politician and dodgy businessman father.
Paul is a bit hopeless and his friends are rather strange, see Jake the poet, but he’s well meaning and never intends to cause harm or offence. He has a very British take on the French (which is the author’s I imagine) and it comes through in the humour and gently teasing nature, much as we always do when talking about our closest frenemy. It’s been almost 1000 years since the Norman invasion and we will never stop ribbing the French and their strange ways!
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 