Book Blurb:
England, 1940. Dearest Ruby, you must have heard the news by now. The very worst has happened. Our countries are at war. What can I do? How can I stop this nightmare from happening? One day soon we’ll be together again. I swear. I love you. E. x
Present day. Ruby Summers has lived an extraordinary life. Now, at ninety-six years old and living in a quiet countryside retirement home, Ruby may be an elderly lady, but her memory remains perfect.
She remembers the summer in rural Norfolk eighty years ago when she fell in love with Edmondo, and the stolen moments spent in the orchard dreaming of their future. But tears fill her green eyes when she also remembers the September morning they embraced as they listened to war being declared on the wireless. As her village turned against Edmondo and his Italian family, Ruby knew she would be forced to make an impossible choice – one that would lead to a betrayal her heart never recovered from, and an earth-shattering secret she has never shared…
But when lonely Ruby decides to take part in a letter-writing scheme for the elderly, and single mother Cassie replies, she realises this could be her chance. Her last chance. By revisiting her past, can she finally share the secret that has haunted her for all these years? And will her unexpected connection with Cassie unearth truths even Ruby never knew were hidden – or will it tear both their lives apart?
This totally gripping and irresistible story of wartime love and heartbreak will captivate readers who love Lorna Cook, Fiona Valpy and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/XzFMNg7
Author Bio:
Sarah Mitchell grew up in Norfolk and studied law at Cambridge University. She practised as a barrister in London for nearly 20 years before turning to writing. Sarah and her husband now live in beautiful North Norfolk with three almost-grown-up children, an extremely affectionate dog and a horse called Joey. Her debut novel, THE LOST LETTERS, was inspired by her parents' experiences in the Second World War and her desire to explore the heart-
breaking impact of the war on women and children. By contrast, THE COUPLE is a dark psychological thriller that twins themes of right and wrong with the age-old complication of an all-consuming past love. Her third novel, THE ENGLISH GIRL is a story inspired by an incredible true love story, a beautiful, sweeping tale of hope, courage and heart-breaking choices. Now, her fourth novel, LETTERS TO A STRANGER, explores themes of love, betrayal and redemption, through the eyes of young Ruby Summers who is forced to make an impossible decision when Italy joins the Second World War and her village turns against the love of her life.
You can follow Sarah Mitchell on Twitter at @SarahM_writer
Author Interview:
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
I’ve never been on a literary pilgrimage, as such, however I did a creative writing masters at the UEA during the year that happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the course, and I had the incredibly good fortune of the most amazing writers coming to the UEA to teach the current students. Without having to leave Norfolk I met Margaret Attwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Andrew Miller. It was when I was standing in the corridor talking to Margaret Atwood, who was still critiquing my work even after her class had finished, it hit me that if Margaret Attwood was taking my writing seriously, then I should too. That, and the moment when Kazuo Ishiguro addressed us all as “fellow writers”, I can still feel the tingle that went down my spine!
Tell us the best writing tip you can think of, something that helps you.
My favourite tip is one that has given me perseverance to keep going in the early stages of a book, when finishing a whole novel seems a very long way off. And it’s this: “writing a book is like driving a car at night, you might not be able to see more than the patch of road in front of your eyes, but you can make the whole journey that way if you keep going”. In many ways it’s a version of “the longest journey starts with but a single step”, but it also reminds me that I don’t need all the answers at the beginning, and that a lot of them will reveal themselves in the weeks and months ahead.
What are common traps for aspiring writers? Advice for young writers starting out.
A common trap, and one I definitely fell into, is wanting the page, the paragraph, even the sentence, to be perfect and writing it over and over again before moving on. You have to tell yourself that nobody is going to read that first draft except you, and it’s OK for it to be rubbish! Keep writing forwards and trust that once you have a first draft you’ll go back and make it better. Otherwise, you can spend a whole week honing a wonderful piece of dialogue only to realise a few months later you don’t need that particular scene at all. I learned this the hard way. In the process of writing my first novel, The Lost Letters, I ended up throwing away more than 30,000 words. They were very carefully crafted, but, as it turned out, not what the book was about!
If you could tell your younger writing self, anything, what would it be?
Don’t be too hard on yourself and celebrate all the little milestones. Writing comes with plenty of rejection and disappointment, so don’t wait for a Sunday Times top 10 slot or a film deal to crack open the Champagne. It’s probably a long wait and there’s a lot to enjoy on the way. And accept that criticism comes with the territory. I belong to a local book club which is a great way to be reminded how different all our tastes are – I don’t think the book that absolutely everyone loves has yet been written.
What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?
I’m friends with a lot of authors I met at the UEA, and also, by chance, Susan Hill. Many years ago, I was asked to host a Q & A session with her and when we were chatting beforehand it turned out she had just moved into a house literally down the road from where I live. Talking to her has made me realise that for most writers, success and longevity require patience and perseverance, and the most important thing is to keep going and try to improve with each book.
Can you give us a quick review of a favourite book by one of your author friends?
A friend of mine called Paula Cocozza has written an incredible book called How To Be Human, about a woman who develops an obsession with a fox and as she does so discovers her own wild power. As well as being brilliantly written, it’s completely original, with the fox at times becoming the narrator. It’s very different from anything I could ever write and fills me with admiration. She has a new book coming out this summer called Speak To Me, which I can’t wait to read.
How did publishing your first book change your process of writing?
I was suddenly writing to deadlines because of a contract, so I had to be much more organised and disciplined. I plotted more in advance so I had a clearer sense of direction, but also had to trust myself and keep writing forwards. It was as if a hand was gently pushing in the small of my back. Exciting, but more serious too.
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
Definitely the cost of my MA at the UEA. I learned so much about how page-turning fiction works – it was like someone taking the back off a clock and showing me all the little cogs whirring away unseen behind the stately passage of the clock hands. On top of that it was such a joy and privilege to spend so many afternoons sitting in the graduate bar talking about books!
What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
My first career was as a barrister, where language has the power to win or lose cases and change peoples’ lives profoundly. As a junior barrister I worked with a very eminent silk, who half-way through a case had the habit of taking off his glasses, leaning a little way over the lectern, and effectively telling the court, “This is how it really is…”. It was storytelling at its best and most powerful. My earliest lesson, though, was as a small child and being read the original William books by my father, which many years later I read to my own children. The laugh-out-loud humour in those stories is because of Richmal Crompton’s razor-sharp use of exactly the right word. They are a wonderfully entertaining lesson in the power of language.
What’s the best way to market your books?
I really wish I knew the answer to this question… I’m terrible at social media because I can never think of anything to say that isn’t some kind of version of, please buy my books!
What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
Normally I have a solid base of research behind me before I start writing and then follow up particular avenues in detail as the story unfolds. My historical fiction books are set in East Anglia and I’ve used lots of online resources, including local history sites, and some rather obscure first-hand accounts of historical events. However, my most memorable research has involved real things. At Norwich County Council I discovered they have a bomb map, which is map of the city from World War II marked with tiny tags that were added during the war, detailing the site of every bomb and the fatalities caused. They display it once a year for public viewing. And in the National Archives in Kew, I was able to read actual correspondence generated during the evacuation process to Canada and the USA; holding that onion-skin paper and reading the old-fashioned typewriter font felt close to time travelling.
Have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction?
The books by Hilary Mantel, particularly A Place of Greater Safety and Wolf Hall, made those historical periods real to me in a way no piece of fiction or textbook has ever done before or since. They made me appreciate something that’s obvious but which somehow I had never fully taken on board: that our present day is no more special than any other time in history and we’re only a tiny part of a huge continuum of human lives stretching back and forth across millennia.
What are the ethics of writing about historical figures?
I’ve largely avoided having to confront this question because the characters in my book are fictional and tend to be ordinary men and woman rather than known historical figures. My most recent book, Letters To A Stranger, does feature a couple letters from “real people” but since I didn’t have to burden them with moral choices or portray much of their personality, I simply made sure to be accurate as regards their titles and areas of responsibility.
Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
Yes, I do read them. Of course, it’s lovely to read the good ones – really lovely – and I always wish there was a way to say thank you to the people who wrote them. I try not to read the bad ones until the book has been up and running for some time and there are lots of good reviews (hopefully!) to cheer myself up again with afterwards. Sometimes reading the bad reviews is useful, because they make me think about how I can improve, but the truth is people have very different tastes and it’s inevitable that some readers won’t like the book. I tell myself bad reviews go with the territory – which they do.
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
Definitely the start of a novel. It’s like being back at the bottom of a mountain squinting up towards the top while surrounded by a few ghost-like, half-formed strangers that I don’t properly know yet.
Tell us about your novel/novels/or series and why you wrote about this topic?
I’ve written three historical fiction novels and one psychological thriller. The psychological thriller is called The Couple and has a big twist that was great fun to write. My historical novels are called, The Lost Letters, The English Girl and, most recently, Letters to a Stranger, which is the love story of a young English girl and an Italian boy living in Suffolk as the village turns on his family during the Second World War. It was my parents who inspired me to write about World War II. In 1940 my mother was very nearly evacuated to Canada. Luckily for me my grandparents changed their mind and she ended up becoming a Wren and meeting my father, a rear-gunner, in a Nissan hut when they both took shelter during a rainstorm. The awful dilemma parents faced, of whether or not to evacuate their children, is the theme of my first book, The Lost Letters. I find my books tend to have dual timelines which I think is because I’m fascinated by how the life experiences of a family can change so quickly from one generation to the next while the consequences of heart-wrenching decisions continue to reverberate down through the years.
What is your favourite line or passage from your own book?
My favourite passage is from Letters To A Stranger, written by the main character, Ruby, in her diary, in October 1939. It sums up why historical novels that make the past feel real are so important to me - sorry, that it’s rather long.
“I’ve realised now how everyone assumes that history, the history we read about in school-books, happens to other people. And not even to real people, worrying, as they make breakfast or tie their shoelaces, about jobs or children or being in love, but to insubstantial pretend people, like characters from a fairy-tale. We imagine that the battles, the plagues, the natural disasters, are a story that never really took place, or happened in some half fictional world that nobody actually lived in. But that’s not true of course, and now history is happening to us, this very minute, and in years to come, we’ll be the people on the page, the ones whom schoolchildren read about in class, and nobody will understand, not properly, that we really existed. That right now I’m sitting in bed wearing my duffle coat because I’m cold and can’t be bothered to make a hot water bottle. That my parent’s voices are drifting from downstairs, a kind of anxious muffle punctuated by sharp little hiccups. That beyond the pool of light from the beside lamp are only inky shadows and the faint, rather ominous outline of my wardrobe. That my hands smell of Pears soap and my fingernails could do with a good scrub. Nobody will believe any of that. Not until history happens to them too.”
What was your hardest scene to write?
To be honest, I find sex scenes the hardest ones to write. I’m always concerned about overwriting them, and sounding horribly clichéd, but on the other hand not conveying enough passion can make the encounter seem rather dreary and mechanical, which I don’t want either! Sometimes I avoid the problem altogether by leaving the characters at the bedroom door, but other times there’s no alternative to grasping the nettle!
Tell us your favourite quote and how the quote tells us something about you.
It’s a quote from a book one of my children gave me called, The Monk Who Sold His Farrari, by Robin Sharma: “Go as far as you can see for now. When you get there, you’ll be able to see further.” I think it says something about the combination of courage, intuition and hard work that’s needed in most areas of life, not only writing. If you dither too much or wait for all the answers before setting-off, you’ll never go anywhere, so best to get going – you can always change direction if you find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be.
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