I am beyond delighted to reveal the fabulous cover for my work in progress, the Unspoken Christmas Novella, Hopes and Fears.
As usual, the cover has been designed by the wonderfully talented, Jane Dixon Smith of JD Smith Design
The story is set at Christmas in 1940 where Alice is at the farm with her young daughter, Martha and her two evacuee children, Harriet and Stephen who are both excited at the prospect of receiving a visit from their mother, Rose, who still lives in blitz ravaged London.
The village of Kirkby Sutton is a conglomerate and an enigma. Formed by the merging of two villages that had outgrown their ability to remain separate as an entity, it nevertheless retains two extremely different and specific identities. One half, as its name suggests, is built around the church and is a (mainly) well-to-do haven of respectability with its Georgian Manor, leafy wide-verged streets lined with large, detached houses, driveways, off road parking and a library. There is also a small 1960s estate, a mix of three bedroomed, privately-owned houses, with an enclave of housing association tenants bolted on for political expediency.
Down the hill, the other half of the village contains a higgledy-piggledy, hotchpotch of stone cottages, modern town houses and rows of Victorian terraces, originally built for the employees at the local lace factory, brewery and estate workers, who made the short trip up the road to toil on the farms of Lord Beresford on the other side of the village. Nowadays, the descendants of those workers still live in the red brick terraces but are mostly employed by industries in the nearby cities of Nottingham and Derby.
The rivalry of its residents compares to any found in much larger towns and cities. You would be hard pressed to find as much animosity at a local Derby football match in Liverpool or Manchester. The annual village fair, which includes a fiercely fought tug-of-war competition, held on a boozy bank holiday weekend, regularly turns violent. For years, a police sergeant from the small town of Higton was paid to referee the event, but when the ageing sergeant retired and the police station was closed down to save money in the 1950s, the residents were left to sort out their own mess, so a committee, made up of the vicar’s wife and a group of teetotal residents from both sides, sat in sober judgment over the proceedings. To this day, the committee still rules on complaints and accusations made by one side against the other. Most of the grievances are easily dismissed, but on a few occasions a vote has to be taken with the chairperson, a lady with no connection to either side of the village holding the casting vote.
I am delighted to announce the release of the eBook version of my new novel, The Reckoning.
The Reckoning is the third and final part of the Unspoken trilogy, following on from the original Unspoken novel and the sequel, The Legacy.
The Official back of the book blurb.
Unspoken Book Three. The Reckoning.
After a fractious few months trying to appease her dysfunctional family, Jessica Griffiths realises that her great grandmother Alice’s legacy has become a millstone around her neck.
With her feisty elderly relatives cruising around the South China Sea she is hoping for a less stressful time, but when Leonora, the meddling ex-wife of her lawyer boyfriend begins to plot and with her own ex, Calvin unable to accept that their relationship is over, she begins to feel the pressure mounting again.
Into the mix walks Josh, the handsome young café owner. Jess is drawn to him immediately. Will he be the one to finally break the Mollison man curse?
Jessica discovers new family secrets as she continues to read through Alice’s wartime diaries but more shocks await as Martha hands over her own disturbing memoirs.
With the cruise ship in trouble and problems nearer to home, Jess finds herself at the centre of another family maelstrom.
Feeling desperately alone and with the weight of the world on her shoulders, can she weather the storm with her family and sanity intact?
Breaking! Tracy will be back very soon. Tracy’s Lockdown Hotmail will hopefully be written and released by the Autumn so you can look forward to seeing how Tracy and her dysfunctional family, managed to live together through the lockdown periods.
To whet your appetites, here’s a Christmas special that was written after the two original books were released. If you’ve never met Tracy before, you’re in for a treat, if you have… well, you’re in for a treat too, see how generous I am?
Tracy’s Christmas.
Hi Emma
How was your Christmas? I bet it was a bit weird spending it in Cornwall. Their accent is hard enough to understand when they’re sober so it must be just about impossible when they’re pissed. I met a bloke from Penzance at a party once, he spent all night betting me that I couldn’t handle his scrumpy. He was only about five-foot two and his trousers were so tight they hid nothing, so I’m pretty sure I could have. I wasn’t really interested anyway; he was drinking homemade cider, it looked like baby shit in a glass. It was full of lumpy bits; I think he must have dropped his Cornish pasty in it.
My Christmas was okay, Mum got a bit drunk and Dad and Gran had their usual three rounds of all-in verbal wrestling. It was better entertainment than those crappy 1970’s reruns of Morecombe and Wise though.
Neil was playing the hero at the police station on Christmas Eve, saving us all from gangsters, drug dealers and other, scummy, low life, so he couldn’t come out with me. I was going to go to Tossers with Pauline Potts and her sister, Tia, but Pauline had a dodgy curry on Tuesday night and spent all day Wednesday on the lavvy. She was gutted because she had to miss her office party at work and Tia pulled the bloke that Pauline’s been lusting after for the last three months. Tia texted me to say she was going out on the piss with him on Christmas Eve, so it meant I had to make alternative arrangements. I rang around a few people but most of them were going to Spanners, that garage music night spot in the precinct. It was all ticket and no one had a spare.
I was saved from the ignominy of spending the night at the Dog and Duck with Dad, by that tart Olivia of all people. I was just standing behind her in the queue for the tills at Primark, listening to her highly confidential gossip, when she let it slip that she had a blind date lined up with some poor sod and they were going to meet up at the Spread Eagle pub at the top end of the council estate. Two things struck me about this. One, the aforementioned poor sod would really have to be blind if he was going to go through with the date after he’d met old yo-yo knickers, and two, the meeting place was aptly named because it was odds on that Olivia would be spread eagled by the end of the night, probably over the pool table. Anyway, the interesting bit was that the pub was having a fancy dress night and it was pay on the door.
I thought I’d have to spend the rest of the day looking for a costume, but then I remembered I still had that Xena, Warrior Princess outfit that I bought in the summer. The one I wore when they chucked me out of the St Moribund’s church roof, fundraiser dance because my tits kept falling out. (The bishop didn’t moan about it though and he had at least five dances with me that night.) I didn’t bother hanging around to see what Olivia was going to be dressed as; she always looks like a hooker whatever she wears.
Dad insisted on dropping me off at the pub in his little vegetable delivery truck because he reckons that estate is like the Gaza Strip during an Israeli invasion. Two doorman pilots, built like a row of brick shithouses wearing flying helmets and goggles, checked my undercarriage as I got out of the car.
‘If you can’t pull in there, don’t go home lonely, I’ll give your bomb doors a good greasing,’ said the one with the false moustache hanging precariously on his top lip.
‘If she can’t pull in there she must’ve smashed an entire hall of mirrors,’ said the one with the Tom Cruise sunglasses. ‘Most of ‘em are so desperate they’d queue for an hour for a turn with Ann Widdecombe.’
I managed to squeeze past them with nothing worse than a cursory grope, and walked over to a kiosk occupied by a forty-something woman dressed like Helen Mirren when she played the Queen in that film. She looked at me like I’d just crawled out from the u-bend.
‘Are you the stripper?’ she asked.
I shoved a tenner onto the counter. ‘Do I look like the stripper?’ I asked contemptuously.
‘Well, yes, you do, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.’ She nodded towards my chest.
I tucked my boobs back into my dress, snatched up my ticket and headed towards the function room.
‘I’d keep those puppies in their kennel if I were you,’ she shouted after me. ‘There are a lot of animal lovers in there tonight.’ Continue reading
It began with a trivial moment of carelessness, but the shockwaves that reverberate from this seemingly insignificant incident, spread far and wide.
Ed and his heavily pregnant wife Mary are on an errand for Ed’s ailing father before the pair depart for warmer climes. But the winter of 1962 comes early and one innocuous event and a hastily taken decision will have devastating consequences for the family of young Rose Gorton. Mary’s already fragile mental state is put under further stress while Ed tries to make sense of events that are spiralling massively, Out of Control.
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