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 Buchan lives in London with her husband and two children. She began her career as a blurb writer for Penguin Books and, later, become a Fiction Editor at Random House. Initially, she juggled writing with motherhood and her publishing career but, after the publication of her third novel, gave up publishing to become a full-time writer. She has never regretted it.

Her books include: Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit, a biography for children, and a series of adult novels. These include: Light of the Moon which took as its subject an undercover agent operating in occupied France during the Second World War and the prizewinning Consider the Lily which was described by the Sunday Times as: ‘the literary equivalent of the English country garden’. Her subsequent novels, Perfect Love, Against Her Nature and Secrets of the Heart were all widely reviewed.

Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman went straight into the bestseller lists and television rights were snapped up. Its subject – a middle-aged woman struggling, and succeeding, to get her life back on course – has touched a nerve, both nationally and internationally, and the feedback has been huge. Looking at marriage from a different point of view, The Good Wife also featured in the bestseller lists for many week and was described by USA Today as ‘visceral and on the mark’. Following That Certain Age, her new novel is a sequel to Revenge of the Middle Aged Woman.

Elizabeth Buchan has reviewed for the main national newspapers, including the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail. She has sat on the committee for the Society of Authors and was Chairman of the judges for the 1997 Betty Trask Award and a judge for the l997 Whitbread Awards. Her short stories have been published in various magazines and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

The Second Wife

The rules currently governing my life are these: rule number one - there is no justice; rule number two - contrary to a husband's hopes, a second wife does not have the Karma Sutra tucked into her handbag, it is more likely to be aspirin; rule number three - never complain, particularly if you have been instrumental in demonstrating rule number one; and rule number four - never serve liver or tofu, it is not clever. It isn't easy stepping into someone else's shoes especially those of your husband's first wife. Minty is finding married life as Mrs Nathan Lloyd a nightmare not least because his close friends and family (including his children) hate her. But for Minty, the biggest obstacle of all is Rose, her husband's ex-wife. Glowing and successful, Rose has experienced a spectacular rebirth and as Minty soon discovers, she also has quite a hold over Nathan. With Buchan's signature gift for capturing women's daily joys and struggles, "The Second Wife" is an irresistible story of love, loss, and renewal that explores the very nature of friendship and the bonds that sometimes grow strongest when stretched to breaking.

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 ( Simon & Schuster)

The Memory Garden

Lamorna Cove, in Cornwall's far west, is a tiny bay set at the mouth of a secluded wooded valley of wild beauty, the haunt, a hundred years ago, of a close-knit colony of artists. Here, to a rented cottage in the overgrown gardens of Merryn Hall, Melanie Pentreath retreats from her busy London life as a lecturer in art history to research a book about the painters, and to seek solace following the death of her mother and a broken love affair. In this magical place, full of echoes of the past, Mel helps her landlord, Patrick Winterton, restore the garden and starts to pull together the shreds of her life. Patrick finds some old paintings in a glory hole in one of the attics, and as they uncover the identity of the artist they are drawn into an extraordinary story of illicit passion and thwarted ambition from the Edwardian past which proves resonant in Mel's own life. Merryn is an idyll, and Mel and Patrick, himself here to escape a romantic disappointment, find themselves drawing closer to one another - until the reality of the outside world once more intervenes and everything is threatened.