Hello Friends!
You may be wondering what today’s post is about. Allie Cresswell‘s new book is out and I bring you a guest post to celebrate it. Allie’s message. Bellow you will also find the author bio and the blurb to “The Lady in the Veil” with the purchase links.
Enjoy!
~Jess
Guest Message
I think it is a sad fact of life that that a person looks like is given far more importance than what they are like as people.
Although social media, TV, magazines and adverts tend to be full of young, beautiful and well-toned human beings, the world isn’t. Speaking personally, as a woman past sixty, my grey hair, sagging body and wrinkles have taken a bit of getting used to. I’ve never been a beautiful person, certainly never well-toned—although I was once young. I have no problem being inside this ‘old lady’ carapace but I’ll admit that catching sight of myself in a mirror (or on my daughter’s Instagram) is a shock.
The reason these things have been on my mind lately is my new novel, The Lady in the Veil. It has turned out to be about being judged by appearances. The eponymous character—Georgina—hides herself from public view for reasons that she does not quite understand. Her mother is extremely retiring, shying from the possibility of being recognised, and Georgina has assimilated this behaviour. Also, a very unpleasant encounter in her pubescent years has given her cause to distrust her appearance; it has an unnerving effect on people. It distracts from who she is. There is something quite extraordinary about her appearance. Increasingly, she hides herself from view, adopting a thick veil.
When she is forced to go to London, where the 1835 season is at its height, far from affording her anonymity, the veil marks Georgina out. Society gossips are galvanised; who is the mysteriously veiled lady? And what horrors does her veil conceal? A modern equivalent of this might be cosmetic surgery that goes wrong; the subject is looked at—but for all the wrong reasons. The kindest thing would be to say nothing, but people are not kind and social media goes crazy with cruel pictures, speculation and scorn. My character finds herself the subject of the same kind of feeding-frenzy. If she had hoped—via the cloaking mechanism of the veil—to be judged for her personal qualities rather than for her appearance, she is sorely disappointed.
What surprised me about the way my story developed was that Georgina’s veil not only skews the way she is seen, but also obscures the way she sees. Necessarily, to keep her face hidden, the gauze of the veil must be thick. How, then, did she see out? My research suggested that the fabric of the veil would be fabricated or decorated in such a way as to allow a greater transparency across the eyes. But it seemed to me impossible that the wearer’s vision could not be hampered. At one point Georgina describes everything ‘as seen through a dirty window’; she is suspicious and distrustful of the outside world, fearful without quite knowing why.
Not only does she not see the world clearly, she does not see herself clearly either. ‘I never look in a mirror,’ she says. How can she expect to be seen, valued, accepted by others if she does not see, value or accept herself?
The Lady in the Veil is the story of a young woman who needs to see and love herself, written by an older woman who, perhaps, needs to do the same.
~Allie Cresswell
Author Bio
Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil.
She did a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London.
She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.
She has two grown-up children, two granddaughters, two grandsons and two cockapoos but just one husband – Tim. They live in Cumbria, NW England.
Social Media Links – Facebook | Twitter | Website
Synopsis
What secrets hide beneath the veil? When her mother departs for a tour of the continent, Georgina is sent from the rural backwaters to stay with her cousin, George Talbot, in London. The 1835 season is at its height, but Georgina is determined to attend neither balls nor plays, and to eschew Society. She hides her face beneath an impenetrable veil. Her extraordinary appearance only sets off gossip and speculation as to her identity. Who is the mysterious lady beneath the veil?
The Lady in the Veil continues the story of the Talbots in The House in the Hollow but stands equally well alone.
Purchase Links: Amazon UK | Amazon US
Don’t forget to comment, don’t be stranger. If you have any book recommendation you can leave a message using the form on my Contact Me page.
If you are an author or publisher and want me to do a review of a book please check out my Request Review page to learn more about the reviewing policies.
I always welcome new books to add to my list and I’m always excited to do reviews and read books. And I’m open to debate and exchange opinions, so let’s talk.
Also, if you would like to join me as a guest on my blog, check out the Guests Post page to know more and contact me so we can start planing your visit.
Love,
Jess
Born Under Fire is a historical novel that tells the story of a girl coming of age and her drive to excel despite the devastating effects of long-term war.
When it comes to writing I have no particular working method. I generally find I am at my most productive early morning when the world is waking up and all is quiet. I know some authors like to have background noise such as music or the sound of a TV but that would never work for me. Nor do I write to a specific time frame. Around one thousand words at a time are ok by me and I have never written more than three thousand at any one sitting. The important thing is to get the stuff written down and try to encourage some kind of flow and with that in mind I don’t edit or correct anything until I have finished the session.
The character of Harry Chase is a mixture of my own plus a sprinkling taken from one or two people I know. I wanted to create an ordinary bloke who is unwittingly placed in an extraordinary situation. Harry is not a hero in any sense and would generally run a mile rather than face a conflict and stand his ground. He is not a weak person but rather someone who all his life has been lead to believe he is an also ran rather than a front runner. He is the sort of person who believes his opinion is correct until he listens to someone else with a different one.
Malcolm Parnell has a passion for painting and teaches art and drawing skills when he is not working on his next novel.
New York
It’s a common misconception that most suicides are an impulsive act – and something I thought was true as well. Although we can’t speak to those who have killed themselves, we can still ask those who survived about their ordeal. And many admit to planning out their suicide for months, maybe even years, before taking any action.
When I was researching overdosing on the Internet, I discovered that Paracetamol kills you by destroying your liver. It’s a slow, painful death that can take up to 10 days. A Paracetamol overdose can be treated within the first few hours, but if the treatment is given too late and fails, the only option is a liver transplant – an option rarely available to those who’ve taken a purposeful overdose.
When is a lie a lifeline? To Tori lies are everything.
The Laws of Magick that drive much of the action in The Kithseeker have a rather peculiar origin: Book repair. The Bookminder series, as a whole, owes much of its genesis to my time working in the “Coll Pres” department of the UW-Madison Memorial Library during my undergraduate years. The bulk of my job was assessing broken books that came our way. Cracked spines. Bent and scribbled on pages. Mold. (And worse.) Some books could be repaired in house or commercially re-bound. Some had to be replaced. Others still might be candidates for preservation in other formats.
At the time, the heart of a plot was rattling around in my brain. [Spoiler alert for book 1] In essence: “Girl destroys library to attack a wizard.” But why? How? I knew what it looked like, could see the scene clearly played out in my head. My work in the library offered up some of these answers: Spell books would not function properly if damaged. Worse, they could “backfire” on the user if the wizard was unaware of the damage and tried to use the book.
The Bookminder series has been arced out from day one. The Laws, too, were set and bound. Sometimes one has taken the lead, sometimes the other. Sometimes they’ve contradicted and I’ve had to really look hard at where the story is allowed to go. Some days, the Laws of Magick are a bit like that old “throw your character off a bridge when you’re bored” method of attacking writer’s block. If not plot, you’ll definitely get something going.
M. K. Wiseman has degrees in animation/video and library science – both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today, her office is a clutter of storyboards and half-catalogued collections of too, too many books. (But, really, is there such a thing as too many books?) When she’s not mucking about with stories, she’s off playing brač or lying in a hammock in the backyard of her Cedarburg home that she shares with her endlessly patient husband.
France, 1680
![Sara-A_1996[2]](https://jessbookishlife.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/sara-a_19962.jpg)
Sara Onnebo changed her science career for one which allows her to make up stories for a living, both as a writer of novels and in her “real” job as a freelance writer, photographer and sometimes translator. She has published three mystery/suspense novels in Swedish with a fourth on the way. The Daughter is her first novel in English. 
Jess Bookish Life 