EXCERPT: ‘You just wrote the perfect story,’ she said. ‘Born beside a railway line, raised in a railway house by the stationmaster and his mad wife, and so the heroine grew to adulthood with her unwed mother’s morals and her father’s lack of conscience – and I’ve already written the ending.’ ‘You’ve got strength enough to write any ending that you want to write, darlin’.’ ‘All done,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s out of my hands – gone to the publishers.’ ABOUT ‘THORN ON THE ROSE’: It is 1939 and Jenny Morrison, distraught and just fifteen years of age, has fled the tiny logging community of Woody C ..read more

I first read this in 2016. I have just listened to the audio version which I also enjoyed. This certainly hasn’t lost any of its pertinence in the intervening years. EXCERPT: GEORGIA It was only a memory now. The three of them walking along the dark, narrow lane. The awkward silence that lingered in their footsteps. The phone buzzing insistently in her pocket. They had been there just a few hours ago, but already it had become a distant recollection of a time when their lives had travelled in a neat, straight line. Georgia could see them vividly without needing to close her eyes – hear the tr ..read more

EXCERPT: A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the People’s Independent Republic of Berkley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasn’t exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was f ..read more

EXCERPT: ‘Do you ever see your dad?’ I asked/ The words fell out of my mouth before I had a chance to catch them. Zed was wearing canvas shoes. There was a hole where his right toe was wearing through. ‘Nah.’ His mouth was full of grey smoke, then he exhaled. ‘He walked out on us when I was six.’ ‘Do you know where he is?’ Zed shook his head. ‘Not really. You wouldn’t understand,’ he said, for a moment speaking to me as if I was a child. ‘Your family is so nice. One day you will.’ ‘Will what?’ I asked. Zed flicked the butt of his cigarette onto the footpath, where it rolled up against the wal ..read more

Photo by u015eule Makarou011flu on Pexels.com I certainly haven’t been lying on the beach reading this weekend. We’ve had a chilly high of 16C today and yesterday, and today thunderstorms and heavy rain. We had planned on going to Speedway this afternoon with friends, but it has been postponed until tomorrow, weather permitting. Fingers crossed it fines up – and gets warmer! We have a long weekend this weekend – Auckland anniversary. Next weekend is even better – there is another public holiday on the Tuesday, so Pete has taken Monday as annual leave, and we are having four days at the beach ..read more

Olive Tree EXCERPT: July 2006 – Arrivals – Alex’s Diary 10th July 2006 For some reason, whenever I’m on a plane I think about dying. To be fair, I think about dying wherever I am. Perhaps being dead is a bit like the weightlessness you feel here, now, in this metal tube. My little sister asked if she was dead the last time we flew because someone told her Grandpa was up on a cloud. She thought she was joining him when we passed one. Why do adults tell kids such ridiculous stories? It only leads to trouble. For myself, I never believed any of them? My own mother gave up trying to use them on m ..read more

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com Happy Friday & welcome to First Lines Friday hosted by Reading Is My SuperPower.  It was too early for birdsong. Harold lay beside her, his hands neat on his chest, looking so peaceful she wondered where he travelled in his sleep. Certainly not the places she went: if she closed her eyes, she saw roadworks. Dear God, she thought. This is no good. She got up in the pitch-black, took off her nightdress and put on her best blue blouse with a pair of comfortable slacks and a cardigan. ‘Harold?’ she called. ‘Are you awake?’ But he didn’t ..read more

EXCERPT: As she neared the double doors of the bus station, she slowed. Help wanted ads, business cards, and what seemed like a hundred missing kid flyers covered a bulletin board next to the door – row after row of innocent smiling faces lined up like faded yearbook photos. She’d always hated those photos: the word MISSING all in caps knocking you between the eyes, the grainy photos taken on happier days before the kids were abducted, when everyone was still blissfully unaware that they’d be stolen from their families some day. The flyers were plastered all over Staten Island, inside the gro ..read more

I started July with 18 books to read for review and ended up with 20 Of those I read 15, and am almost finished the 16th, giving me an 80% review success rate, well up on my dismal 64% rate for June. Plus I read or listened to four books purely for pleasure during the month. And read and reviewed two titles from my backlist. So that was a total of twenty-two reads for the month of July. I read one debut novel during July, A Murder of Crows by Sarah Yarwood-Lovett which I rated .6 plus I read five books by authors I haven’t previously read. They were: Aft the Flood by Dave Warner .3 Old Frie ..read more

EXCERPT: Gracie was still asleep on his lap when I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! began at nine o’clock. In this episode, a comedian Albert had never found funny, a pop star he’d never heard of, and somebody who called himself a ‘social media influencer’, a profession he’d never understood, were sitting around the camp talking about their biggest fears. ‘Mine’s spiders,’ said the pop star, pulling a face. ‘Mine’s snakes,’ said the comedian, squirming. He turned to the influencer. ‘What’s yours?’ ‘People,’ Albert said out loud, talking over the influencer. ‘People.’ As the c ..read more