Month: June 2017

blog tours, giveaway

Giveaway: Wolves In The Dark by Gunnar Staalesen @OrendaBooks #booktour

if only I could read faster

wolves blog tour poster

I am very excited to be on the blog tour for Wolves In The Dark by Gunnar Staalesen and translated by Don Bartlett on behalf of Orenda Books. Staalesen’s Varg Veum series has been going for almost forty years and this is the 21st book in the series about the private detective. Pretty amazing to keep a series going for so long and for it to still remain hugely popular and award winning.

Don’t be put off by this being such a long series and thinking that you need to start right at the beginning, these books can all be read as a standalone, although chances are that when you’ve read one Varg Veum book you will want to read more.

So, I have something very exciting, for those of you that have read Staalesen’s books before, and for those who have not yet had that pleasure. I am giving away not one, but three books in the series!! You will win We Shall Inherit the Wind, Roses Never Die which recently won the Petrona Award, and the new Varg Veum book, Wolves in the Dark.

How amazing is that?!! Now, of course, you can’t get something this good for nothing, but all we are asking is for a few clicks of your mouse to be entered. Click herehttps://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js“> to enter to win this great prize!

 

 

About We Shall Inherit the Wind:

1998. Varg Veum sits by the hospital bedside of his long-term girlfriend Karin, whose life-threatening injuries provide a deeply painful reminder of the mistakes he™s made. Investigating the seemingly innocent disappearance of a wind-farm inspector, Varg Veum is thrust into one of the most challenging cases of his career, riddled with conflicts, environmental terrorism, religious fanaticism, unsolved mysteries and dubious business ethics. Then, in one of the most heart-stopping scenes in crime fiction, the first body appears

A chilling, timeless story of love, revenge and desire, We Shall Inherit the Wind deftly weaves contemporary issues with a stunning plot that will leave you gripped to the final page. This is Staalesen at his most thrilling, thought-provoking best.

About Where Roses Never Die:

September 1977. Mette Misvær, a three-year-old girl, disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch, suspicions are raised, but Mette is never found. Almost 25 years later, as the expiration date for the statute of limitations draws near, Mette’s mother approaches PI Varg Veum, in a last, desperate attempt to find out what happened to her daughter. As Veum starts to dig, he uncovers an intricate web of secrets, lies and shocking events that have been methodically concealed. When another brutal incident takes place, a pattern begins to emerge. Chilling, shocking and full of extraordinary twists and turns, Where Roses Never Die reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world’s foremost crime thriller writers.

Wolves in the Dark:

Reeling from the death of his great love, Karin, Varg Veum’s life has descended into a self-destructive spiral of alcohol, lust, grief and blackouts. When traces of child pornography are found on his computer, he’s accused of being part of a paedophile ring and thrown into a prison cell. There, he struggles to sift through his past to work out who is responsible for planting the material . . . and who is seeking the ultimate revenge. When a chance to escape presents itself, Varg finds himself on the run in his hometown of Bergen. With the clock ticking and the police on his tail, Varg takes on his hardest—and most personal—case yet. Chilling, shocking and exceptionally gripping, Wolves in the Dark reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world’s foremost thriller writers.

You can find the Varg Veum books on author, Gunnar Staalesen’s Amazon UK page.

 

 

5*, book review, debut author

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman @GailHoneyman @HarperCollinsUK

if only I could read faster

 

eleanoroliphant
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

 

My Review:

At first, I wasn’t really sure what to make of Eleanor Oliphant, I mean the way in which she speaks and thinks is more than a little unusual, but by the end of the book I think that she had a little piece of my heart that will stay Oliphant shaped for quite some time to come.

Eleanor is an incredibly lonely person, she goes to work and drinks too much on the weekends to make the time go faster so that she can go back to work and have something to do. She thinks that her colleagues hate her and spend a lot of their time laughing at her. She has no friends, only her mother who she speaks to on the phone once a week. Which for Eleanor is still too often. Despite all of this, Eleanor thinks that she is happy, she doesn’t feel the need for people in her life, she’s self-sufficient and happy with that. I have to admit that I really empathised with Eleanor, as an introvert I think that Eleanor and I have more than a few things in common.

When Eleanor meets the man of her dreams she thinks that life is going to be getting a lot better. She starts to pay attention to her appearance and to what she’s wearing for the first time, and begins to see and experience things differently. She also finds herself spending time with Raymond, the IT guy from work, he gradually gets Eleanor to open up and they become friends, something new and alien to Eleanor.

When the love of her life turns out to be a lot less perfect that she’d thought, Eleanor plunges into a destructive depression. But with the support of her new friend, and a very supportive boss, Eleanor starts to put her life back together. I couldn’t help but cheer her on, and even feel proud of this fictional character whose funny way of speaking and thinking now felt endearing.

As the book goes on the story behind Eleanor and why she is how she is becomes clear, I think that the reader can’t help but feel sorry for her, but as the book progresses I felt a sense of respect for Eleanor, that she’d survived so much and yet here she was, coming out the other side.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is a wonderful book that will hopefully make people think about the people that they know, how much they really know about them, and what struggles they might have that you know nothing about. Loneliness is becoming more and more of a problem in our society, and this book is a wonderful example of how dangerous and destructive it can be. With a debut novel this good, Gail Honeyman is definitely an author to watch!

Thank you to the publisher, Harper Collins UK, for a copy of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman via Netgalley.

Blurb:

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive – but not how to live

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

About the Author:

gailhoneyman

Gail Honeyman wrote her debut novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, while working a full time job, and it was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize as a work in progress. She has also been awarded the Scottish Book Trust’s Next Chapter Award 2014, and was longlisted for BBC Radio 4’s Opening Lines, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Gail lives in Glasgow.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is out now and available from Amazon UK and Amazon US.

5*, book review

The Marsh King’s Daughter (AKA Home) by Karen Dionne @KarenDionne @LittleBrownUK #MarshKing

if only I could read faster

 

themarshkingsdaughter
The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne.

 

I’m editing this review to say that the book has had a name change, it is now called Home in the UK. It’s also being made into a movie which is really very exciting!

My Review:

I’d heard quite a lot about The Marsh King’s Daughter before reading it, all of it good. There’s always a risk when that happens that the book will let you down, so with slight trepidation, and without knowing anything about the story, I started to read.

And boy, what a read it was! I thought that the Marsh King’s Daughter was an incredibly written book, the amount of research that the author must have put into the story is mindblowing.

I really liked that the story was told from Helena’s point of view, going from when she was really young all the way up to an adult and a parent herself. The journey took Helena from a young child, totally unaware of the circumstances of her existence and the world beyond the marsh that she lives in with her mother and father, who she totally idolises as he teaches her how to survive in the wild, to track and hunt animals, and, perhaps most importantly, to disrespect her mother.

But as Helena grows up she can’t help but see flaws in her father, and she begins to see that maybe her mother is stronger than she ever imagined.

The Marsh King’s Daughter is sometimes upsetting and hard to read, the brutality that her father displayed is extreme. What made it even harder to read was how real it felt, I often got so caught up in the story that I was sure that Helena was real and that I was, in fact, reading a true crime book.

Karen Dionne is not an author that I had heard of before The Marsh King’s Daughter but she is certainly an author that I will be looking out for and very keen to read more of. I am completely in awe of how she crafted this book, it is definitely one to add to your reading pile.

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of The Marsh King’s Daughter through Netgalley.

Blurb:

The suspense thriller of the year – The Marsh King’s Daughter will captivate you from the start and chill you to the bone.

‘I was born two years into my mother’s captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. If I had known then what I do now, things would have been a lot different. I wouldn’t have adored my father.’

When notorious child abductor – known as the Marsh King – escapes from a maximum security prison, Helena immediately suspects that she and her two young daughters are in danger.

No one, not even her husband, knows the truth about Helena’s past: they don’t know that she was born into captivity, that she had no contact with the outside world before the age of twelve – or that her father raised her to be a killer.

And they don’t know that the Marsh King can survive and hunt in the wilderness better than anyone… except, perhaps his own daughter.

Packed with gripping suspense and powerful storytelling, The Marsh King’s Daughter is a one-more-page, read-in-one-sitting thriller that you’ll remember for ever.

About the Author:

karendionne

Karen Dionne is the author of dark psychological suspense THE MARSH KING’S DAUGHTER, coming June 13, 2017 from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and three other novels.

Karen is cofounder of the online writers community Backspace, and organizes the Salt Cay Writers Retreat held every other year on a private island in the Bahamas. She is a member of the International Thriller Writers, where she served on the board of directors as Vice President, Technology.

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne is out on 13th June, 2017 and is available from Amazon UK and Amazon US.