We are returning to France for another great summer read by Gillian Harvey . The Village Cafe in the Loire was published by Boldwood on July 12th. High-flyer Becky Thorne cannot believe what she’s being told. She doesn’t need to be signed off for burnout! Life has been a bit chaotic lately, that’s all. As if dealing with her enviable job and permanent meddling from her mother aren’t enough, she’s also inherited a café in the Loire from an estranged great-aunt, complete with sitting tenant who refuses to budge. But nobody stands in Becky’s way! Ignoring her best friend Amber’s advice, she decides to storm over to France and sort the tenant out. Then she can finally get the café sold and jump back on the career ladder. What she doesn’t count on is the tenant being Pascale, who is six feet of tall, dark, handsome and extremely grumpy about her plans for change. Not to mention the village and the secrets it holds about her past. Becky’s path to succes...
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.
Thanks to Helen Matthews and Rachel of Rachel's Random Resources for a place on the tour.
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