A sunny England
June has flown by! It has been exciting to see the reviews for The Kismet Pension. It’s quite scary sending your book out into the world, especially when it’s your first one, but I’m happy to report that a lot of people have enjoyed reading it. The planned blog tour took place last week and the week before, with 9 bloggers reviewing the book and making some lovely comments, such as, ‘The writing was so warm and welcoming’ and ‘The sense of place is very vivid’. The first blogger to review it is half Turkish, so I was delighted when she called it, ‘A slice of home’.
I have been working on the second book in the series and I think I am now ready to write the final draft. I will then be looking for some ‘beta readers’ to read it and give me their ideas, before sending it to an editor. The process, which last year seemed so involved and daunting is now, not exactly easy, but at least familiar. While I’m writing, I sometimes come up with more ideas of things that could happen in the village and make a note of them for further books. I hope to make the Kismet Pension into a series of four or five books.
One of the highlights of this month for me was an afternoon with Louis de Bernières. He read a passage from Birds Without Wings and talked about what made him write the book, how he feels about it and a little about his writing method in general. We had a chance to ask questions and, when he was signing my copy of Birds Without Wings, I got to tell him that I had published my book! Thank you to Jane who organised the event.
I am having a short holiday in the UK and can’t believe the glorious weather, though it was not so pleasant on the underground in London. Last Friday, we visited the house and gardens at Great Dixter (Sussex). The house has an impressive medieval great hall, in which you can almost see the ghosts floating past! The gardens are varied but mostly in an English cottage garden style – absolutely beautiful, but so different from our gardens which are now bursting with bougainvillea and oleander. I love the oleander which grows anywhere – in gardens, on beaches, wild on the mountains – and comes in so many colours.
I also had a chance to compare the views of the English countryside with those I’m used to in Turkey on a walk up Cleeve Hill, near Cheltenham Spa. Where those in Turkey are dramatic and wild (mountains, forests, sea), the landscape here is lush, organised and, with its hedgerows and church steeples, feels as though it reflects hundreds of years of habitation. By contrast, I met a friend in the new development at Kings Cross, London, where we spent the whole day eating, mooching around the shops and people watching!
Every Precious and Fragile Thing – Barbara Davis
Set on the Rhode Island coast, this tells the story of a mother and daughter who have become distant. They are both held back by their pasts, and the secrets that are uncovered when the daughter is forced to spend time with her mother, threaten to end their relationship forever. They both need to confront their pasts before they can move on. (This is also very true of the main character in my not-yet-published book, which is funny because after several working titles, that is now called Precious Things!)
Tell Me How This Ends – Jo Leevers
In the very different setting of present day and 1960s London, this book also tells the story of two people. Henrietta is obsessive and socially awkward and when she gets a job transcribing the ‘life stories’ of elderly people, she meets Annie and is determined to tell Annie’s story in full. But Annie wants to tell the story of her sister’s disappearance when they were young. These two quite different women find a way to bond and as Annie’s life is ending, Henrietta’s becomes richer.
I hope you had a lovely June.
Melanie