Editorial Consultants

I have known both Elizabeth Buchan and Rachel Hore for many years and am fortunate to have them as consultants to my service. Their wide range of experience as commissioning editors, reviewers for national newspapers and as novelists themselves enables us together to offer authoritative and up-to-date advice.

Elizabeth Buchan

Elizabeth spent her childhood moving home every three years – including living for brief periods in Egypt and Nigeria before moving to Guildford, York and Edinburgh.

                  After graduating from the University of Kent at Canterbury with a double honours degree in English and History, she began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books. This was a job which required the hide of a rhinoceros, a nimble mind and the – occasional – box of tissues. People tend to shout at blurb writers but they are resourceful creatures which she and the team proved by continuing to produce a stream of copy for back jackets through thick and thin. Looking back, it was a golden era. Not many people are paid to spend their time reading through the treasury which is Penguin Books and there was no better education.  Later, after having married and producing two children, she moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time which was something she had always planned to do since childhood – when she was frequently caught reading under the bedclothes with a torch after being put to bed which gave both books and reading a deliciously subversive tinge.

                  It was not an easy decision to take the gamble but she has never regretted it. As a writer, she has travelled all over the world and one of the many pleasures of the book tour has been to meet readers of all ages and to share with them a mutual passion for books and reading. She is in touch on line with many of them.

                  Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She reviews for the Sunday Times (UK) and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes, and also been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) awards. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and a past Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

Daughters

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all mothers want to see their daughters happily settled.

But for Lara, mother to Maudie and stepmother to Jasmine and Eve, realizing this ambition has not been easy.

With an ex-husband embarking on a new marriage, and the surprising and late blooming developments in her own love life to contend with, Lara has enough to worry about, especially with Eve's upcoming wedding.

And when she begins to fear that Eve is marrying a man who will only make her unhappy, and Maudie reveals something that shocks the entire family, Lara faces the ultimate dilemma. Does she step in and risk the wrath of her daughters? Or does she stand by and watch them both make what she fears will be the biggest mistakes of their lives?

Rachel Hore

Rachel Hore worked in London publishing for nearly twenty years, most latterly as Senior Editorial Director, Fiction, at HarperCollins Publishers.

Authors she edited there included Cathy Kelly, Barbara Erskine, Sidney Sheldon, Craig Thomas, Jane Asher, Susan Howatch and Isabel Wolff. After moving to Norfolk in 2001 with her family she has built a freelance career that includes editing and advising authors, teaching at the University of East Anglia and reviewing fiction for the Guardian.

www.rachelhore.co.uk

Titles: The Dream House; The Memory Garden, The Glass Painter's Daughter, A Place of Secrets, A Gathering Storm (Simon & Schuster)

A Gathering Storm

Photographer Lucy Cardwell has recently lost her troubled father, Tom. While sifting through his papers, she finds that he has been researching an uncle she never knew he’d had, Lucy visits her childhood home, the once beautiful Carlyon Manor. She meets an old woman named Beatrice, who has an extraordinary story to tell . . .

Growing up in the 1930s, Beatrice plays with the children of Carlyon Manor – especially pretty, blonde Angelina. Then, one summer at the age of fifteen, she falls in love with a young visitor to the town: Rafe Ashton, whom she rescues from the sea when his boat is caught up in a storm.

But the dark clouds of war are gathering, and Beatrice, Rafe and the Wincantons will all be swept up in the cataclysm of events that follow. Beatrice’s story is a powerful take of courage and betrayal, spanning from Cornwall to London, and occupied France, in which friendship and love are tested, and the ramifications reach down the generations.