Today is my stop on the Olive Garden Choir blog tour. I have a guest post from author Leah Fleming for you today. If you like what you read you can click here to order your copy now. Don't forget to check out the other stops on the tour for more exclusive content and reviews!
Here's what it's all about:
An evocative novel of secrets, love and redemption under the
Greek sun.
On the beautiful island of Santaniki, close to Crete, it’s
not all white sands and sunshine. When retired bookseller Ariadne Blunt
suggests the English residents form a choir, there are groans of resistance.
After a little persuasion, the group gather in Ariadne’s
olive garden to rehearse, but each member of this choir has their own struggles
and secrets. Ariadne’s partner, Hebe, is in failing health. Clive struggles to
accept the loss of his wife while Della, the Pilates teacher, drinks too much.
Then there is Mel, the real songbird amongst them, English wife of a taverna
owner who hides her talent until the choir inspires her to raise her voice once
more.
In this tiny community, the choir brings the residents together
like never before in a bittersweet tale of love and loss – and how life can
begin again when you let go of the past.
And here's what Leah has to say:
FAR FROM MY PLOTTING SHED.
Virginia Woolf said “Every woman should have a room of their own”. In my case it is a shed at the bottom of the garden currently in use as a winter rescue home for delicate plants. But as spring approaches, plans are afoot to clear out the debris to restore it once more to my writing room.
From here over the years I have travelled far a field; on a life boat watching the Titanic go down, to a remote Scottish island and the back streets of New York, to the mountains of Crete.
Readers might recognize these locations from some of my novels. Each journey of imagination comes from that first idea of what story I will write next and where it will be set; perhaps a café in wartime Lichfield, the shores of the Mississippi or the outback of Australia. The possibilities are endless.
I can’t seem to stay too close to home in my village when I locate my story; a Yorkshire Quaker family fleeing persecution to help found a colony in Pennsylvania in the 1690s: As with most of these imaginative explorations, I do try and visit the exact spots where I think the story unfolds; the shores of Muscatine, Iowa, the lace city of San Sepolchro Italy, a synagogue in Chania, Crete where I worked as a tour guide for several months. Some are too far to visit but with internet roaming I can Google myself onto the very streets of Adelaide or the cemetery in Halifax Nova Scotia where the Titanic victims were buried. The researches I do are important and sometimes I find personal accounts of real people which add depth to a character. .
Once a subject grabs me I have to follow where it leads. It involves lots of thinking before I visit the location. Now that THE OLIVE GARDEN CHOIR is out on e- book and hardback, where next? Perhaps a sequel that will mean yet another trip to my beloved island of Crete soon?
It’s on these visits I meet friends, now residents there, who know far more than I do about living in another culture , giving me useful anecdotes. So time for me to open up the “Plotting”shed where ideas are hatched, pour a glass of something sparkly, gaze over the hills and get cracking on STRANGERS IN THE OLIVE GARDEN. Wish me luck on my travels.
Leah Fleming.
About the Author
After careers in teaching, catering, running a market stall,
stress management courses in the NHS as well as being a mother of four, Leah
Fleming found her true calling as a storyteller. She lives in the beautiful
Yorkshire Dales but spends part of the year marinating her next tale from an
olive grove on her favourite island of Crete.
Follow
Leah:
Facebook: @Leah Fleming
Wesbite: leahfleming.co.uk
Thanks so much to Leah for stopping by and sharing today, don't forget to check out the other blogs on the tour!
Buy
Links:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2T1mKmW
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2SHh7Lm
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2ScX6XG
iBooks: https://apple.co/2ScXrJW
Follow
Head of Zeus:
Website: www.headofzeus.com
Twitter: @HoZ_Books
Facebook: @headofzeus
This sounds adorable! I love books set in Greece and would absolutely pick this up.
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