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A Little Place in Prague by Julie Caplin #Review #RomanyicEscapesBook12

    Today I am delighted to be featuring the twelfth in Julie Caplin's Romantic Escapes series : A Little Place in Prague.  It was published  by One More Chapter on October 24th.   It's been years since Anna has seen Leo Knight. And of all the apartments in all the cities in all the world, he just happens to walk in to her cosy new attic home – as her new housemate. As the two walk the cobbled streets of Prague, taking in the sights and sounds from Wenceslas Square, frosted with snow, to the soft glow of candlelit Charles Bridge, the enchantment of the City of a Hundred Spires soon starts to work its magic on them…   My Thoughts After you have read this book, you will certainly feel that you have visited Prague. The level of detail about everyday life there and the descriptions of the different places around the city certainly conjures up the atmosphere of the place. You can really sense how Anna and Leo come to love living there. It also has a lovely wintry feel, just

Lies Behind the Ruin by Helen Matthews #Author Guest Post



I am delighted to welcome author Helen Matthews to the blog today to talk about some of the background to her novel, Lies Behind the Ruins.  Before we hear from her, let's find out more about her book:



Emma Willshire has overcome plenty of obstacles in her life. From student bride to single mum of a son, Owen, but she has found happiness with her second husband, Paul and another child, Mollie. Emma's dark days seem far behind her until a fatal accident happens at Paul's work and he is held responsible.

On holiday in France, Paul's behaviour turns erratic. On impulse, he buys a cheap, dilapidated property and, to Emma's dismay, persuades her they can renovate it into a holiday home.

Back in England, their problems spiral out of control. Escape to a new life in France seems the only solution but with heart-breaking loss for Emma. As the couple strive to renovate their ruin and open a small business, shadows from the past threaten their happiness and safety. Because, how can you build a new life on toxic foundations?





 Welcome to Books, Life and Everything, Helen. Now it's over to you!

Helen:


If you ever go on holiday to France, I’m guessing that, like me, you discover bargains in the supermarket and load up your trolley with wine and cheese. It’s easy to be tempted to get out the credit card and overspend. I do the same. But what I didn’t expect, while we were on a family camping holiday many years ago, was to come home having impulse-bought a house!  And not even a habitable house. A ruin.

That summer, just after the turn of the millennium, the heat in our  coastal resort was stifling and it was hard to stay cool under canvas. We heard about a nearby village, with a chateau and a lakeside beach, shaded by trees, and this drew us inland from the scorching coast. 

It was a picturesque spot and had a comfortable, leisurely pace of life but the last thing we expected was to fall in love with the village and put down roots there. As we strolled around the streets, we discovered many of the ancient cottages in the village centre were up for sale. In those days I was our main family breadwinner, with a very stressful corporate job, while my husband ran a small business and fitted it around the needs of our children. Like many families we used to dream of a new life, perhaps escaping to France to run a gîtes (holiday homes) business, but the sums didn’t add up. Yet the prices  of these village houses were rock bottom (under £8,000) compared to the UK but too small for a family of four. That’s when we noticed our ‘ruin’,  an old tumbledown farm building set in a vast overgrown field, very similar to the property the Willshire family view in the first chapter of Lies Behind the Ruin.

While our children sulked and protested, we impulse-bought it, planning to turn it into a holiday home. To raise the deposit, we acted like problem gamblers, inserting all our credit and bank cards into an ATM to withdraw the ten per cent deposit and handing it over to  the estate agent on the spot.

It took us years to convert our ‘ruin’ into a liveable holiday home. Our holidays were spent in a caravan on the muddy building site while renovations slowly progressed. To raise the money for the work, we regularly increased the mortgage on our UK home.  Our children spent their holidays painting walls and helping assemble IKEA kitchen units but, once it was done, they got their reward. They could bring their friends on holiday with them, enjoy an outdoor life, roam freely, go surfing and climbing, cycle long distances and take out boats on the river.

I’d often thought of sharing some of these experiences in a novel. As an author, I’m fascinated by family relationships, especially when these are dysfunctional but I also like to delve into the more secretive and twisted side of human nature. There’s no idyllic ‘year in Provence’ experience for my characters. I haven’t set Lies Behind the Ruin in the area of France where our house is, but in Limoges and the surrounding Limousin countryside. I hope readers will recognise the sights, sounds and tastes of France within the fictional world I’ve created.

I began planning Lies Behind the Ruin in late 2015, while on a writers’ retreat at Gladstone’s library in North Wales. At that time, I had no inkling there would be a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and that the country would vote to leave. I was halfway through writing the book when the referendum was announced. 

Whatever any of us may think of Brexit, and I’m expressing no position here, in the future, young families of limited means probably won’t be able to start a new life in France, as the Willshire family does in Lies Behind the Ruin. The right to move to France, Spain, Germany or elsewhere – to work or start a business – is linked to freedom of movement for EU citizens. Over many years of visiting France, I’ve met people of all social and income backgrounds who have taken advantage of the freedom of movement rules, sometimes after a redundancy, bereavement or other life-changing event; sometimes to start a business or simply because they thought they could give their children a better life. In future, that opportunity may be reserved for the wealthy, or those who secure a  job offer from an employer who is prepared to go through the bureaucracy of applying for a work visa for them.

The challenge of writing about contemporary themes is that the world constantly changes. When the Referendum was announced, I wondered if  I should abandon Lies Behind the Ruin in case it turned out to be a historical novel before it was even published! But the action in my book takes place between the summer of 2015 and January 2017, so I rewrote some plot lines and et voilà Brexit became yet another challenge for my characters to face.

To find out what happens to the Willshire family when they try to rebuild their lives and renovate their ‘ruin’ in France, you can buy Lies Behind the Ruin from Amazon and all good bookshops.

Book links:


Thanks for dropping by today, Helen and good luck with the rest of the tour! 

                                                                            About the Author


Helen Matthews is the author of Lies Behind the Ruin, a contemporary suspense novel set in France, to be published in April 2019 by Hashtag Press. Her debut novel After Leaving the Village, published in 2017, won first prize for the opening pages of a novel at Winchester Writers’ Festival. Born in Cardiff, she read English at the University of Liverpool and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford Brookes University. Helen’s short stories and flash fiction have won prizes and been published in Reflex Fiction, Ad Hoc, Artificium, Scribble and Love Sunday. Her freelance journalism has been published in the Guardian and broadcast on BBC radio. She is an ambassador for Unseen, a charity that campaigns to end human trafficking and modern slavery.

You can follow Helen here:  Facebook  |    Twitter

Thanks to Helen Matthews and Rachel of Rachel's Random Resources for a place on the tour.
 

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