Hello Friends!

‘WHERE THE MAGIC IS,’ is a story about ‘Home and Belonging.’ I wanted to explore – what is it that makes a house a home? What is it that makes us feel we belong in one place, and with some people, as opposed to some others? Then – what happens when the assumptions we’ve made around all of these things are shaken loose and collapse all around us?

The answer lies in some unexpected places, and it turns out it’s also a story about hope. It’s a story about what happens when you dare to go beyond yourself in search of a little magic!

(photo courtesy of Selene).

The story takes the shape of a road-trip, bringing soon-to-be-wed Sofia, and her twelve-year-old daughter Ida, all the way from hot and dusty Rio to the misty, Highlands of Scotland. Learning that she’s tragically losing her eye-sight, young Ida’s looking for her courage: she’s set her heart on following the trail of Scotland’s national hero, William Wallace. The story centres around their mission to undertake a poignant now-or-never ‘memory-trip.’ However, when their original tour-guide is obliged to bow out, events take an unexpected turn as handsome Scot Callum McGregor steps in to help out a friend. He’s entertaining and fun. He’s hot! With her possessive and uptight fiancé in mind, Sofia’s hesitant.  But, when Cal promises Ida he’ll take her to a special location where she can discover a little of ‘The true magic of the Highlands,’ she’s immediately smitten. 

Only problem is, despite appearances, Cal’s not actually a tour-guide. His own job is a little more risqué. Sofia’s caught in a cleft stick. Continue on with the trip, with this very unsuitable, far-too-sexy and charming yet caring man – or call Ida’s whole trip off? Besides, Sofia has her own secret agenda for wanting to stay on in the UK that she’d rather everyone back home didn’t know about…

The trio proceed with their trip but as their friendship blossoms it becomes clear that both Sofia and Cal are in their own ways, compromised. Sofia’s marrying into an uber-rich family, to a man her own, close-knit family are all thrilled with, but – is she? Meeting Cal has fueled deeply uncomfortable doubts about her upcoming marriage. Daring to express this to her family only elicits their wrath. With Williams Wallace’s quest for ‘freedom’ still ringing in her ears, Sofia finds herself questioning just how much of her personal freedom she’s willing to relinquish, in order to satisfy others’ demands? Home-loving Sofia cares dearly for her family but, can she still belong to people who don’t agree with her choices – without conforming?

Conversely, coming from an unhappy and rejecting early home, Cal’s concluded that family life’s not for him. He’s settled for a job that brings him rich rewards, but which also acts an effective barrier to him forming any kind of meaningful relationships.  The road trip affords Sofia and Ida a chance to  show Cal a totally different side of what it could mean, to ‘belong’… but will this former soldier find the courage to pursue the kind of home and relationship his heart truly desires?  

 Ida – who’s losing her sight – appears to be the one who can see what they’re both facing only too clearly.

The question is, will Sofia and Cal see it – what really matters to them – before it’s all too late?  

Click here to read the Gibraltar Chronicle review of this latest book, as written by Alice Mascarenas

‘When all you need is the one thing no-one else believes in…’

Now available to buy on  Amazon UK 

Or Amazon US

When I set out to write my 8th novel in Feb 2020, little did I know the world was on the cusp of such far-reaching and monumental change. All I knew was, The Girl You Forgot had landed me a three-book deal
with a publisher. I needed something new to write about. As is usual with me, ‘ideas’ felt thin on the ground, I needed something I could feel something about. Waiting for a friend, I randomly walked into the Healing Centre at the Arthur Findlay College and sat down, enjoying the oasis of calm within.

Within minutes, a healer came over and put her hand on my arm. In my mind, I immediately became aware of an elderly lady who I could sense was incredibly sad over the fact that she would never go home again. Her immense grief washed over me. I found myself blubbing, deeply saddened by a pain I was aware was not my own but when I came away a short while later I knew I had the theme for my new book… it would be about Home and Belonging.

I started to wonder; home and belonging seem to go so naturally together, but what happens to a person inside when they feel, for whatever reason, that they can’t go ‘home’ anymore? Does that also mean they can no longer ‘belong’ – and, is it the case that we always have to conform, if we want to belong? When we can’t go home and we’re looking for some peace in this world – and, heaven knows, enough of us have felt that over the last few rocky years – where, indeed, might it be found?

As I pondered these questions, my characters gradually began to introduce themselves… Sofia, who’s faced early on with tough decisions that threaten to make her feel she no longer ‘belongs.’ Charming Cal, who’s settled for making his home wherever he lays his hat – except secretly, he longs for a real base, a
family to call his own. Young Ida, who’s facing serious health problems, but whose desire to follow the Braveheart trail in the Highlands of Scotland echoes her growing inner desire for a sense of freedom.

Home. Belonging. Freedom. I’d little inkling when I wrote the now-prescient synopsis for this book that these would all be themes that would rise to the fore for so many following the events of the next few years.

In the interim, things changed for me, too. By the new year, the publisher I’d signed with back in 2020 were keen on me making some radical alterations to my current book. Unfortunately, they weren’t  changes I felt I could accommodate without deeply compromising the story. Whilst respecting their commercial judgement, I knew the result would’ve been a story not written in my own voice. In Where the Magic Is, each of my characters in their own ways finds their own voice. It’s one of the things I value most about my job writing stories… that I get to express mine. The publisher and I have since amicably parted ways.

Returning to the question of where our sense of peace and ‘home’ might be found at a time when the world around us is shifting at a rate of knots… my characters come finally to an understanding of something that is both profound and innate in our human nature. In the end, I think the book’s title says it all.

I enjoyed writing it very much.

I hope you will enjoy reading it, too.

For now, all my best wishes,

Giselle xx

My publishers Boldwood Books asked me to write a blog post for them for their website about this latest book.

I think it deserves to be shared here!

On August 11^th, 2020,  my seventh book, The Girl You Forgot, was finally released. It took two years of stops and false starts and another two of actual writing to get there – 4 years in total – which has made it the most challenging book I’ve written to date. However, the idea which inspired it remained the same throughout. It came from an article I read, a personal account written by a journalist who’d studied neuroscience at University. One day, his class were discussing how a tutor, diagnosed with a brain tumour, had walked into the sea rather than risk lose all his life’s memories which went to make up ‘who he was.’ A classmate had made the observation that the tutor would still have been ‘himself’ even if without all his memories… and that set me thinking: how much of our identity is gleaned from our memories and stories we tell about ourselves. How much of it would endure, even if we lost those memories?

In essence, the story is really about the soul. It’s about Identity. It’s about what makes us who we are, above and beyond all the outward trappings of who we appear to be, to the outside world. It’s about a girl who struggles to help her man reconnect with his lost identity so that he will reconnect with her. His heart is the doorway that leads to that golden goal… only, it’s not a path she can navigate without peril! It’s a story about Truth and about the lies we sometimes tell ourselves in order to keep our fragile sense of who we are, intact… until the day comes when my protagonists can’t do that anymore.

As I said, It took me a long time to write. Not only is the structure of the novel complex, all the issues contained within it felt overwhelming at times…strangely prescient of the strangely changed world we were about to step into. I can’t help but feel that the issues are very live and relevant at this moment. With so many of us having seen much of our daily routine, basically, much of our lives, stripped away, leaving us bare… what endures? How much will we recognise ourselves in the weeks and months to come? How many of us will grasp the courage to move beyond despair – or even mere acceptance – and take the golden kernel of all that we are, into the years that lie ahead?

I struggled with this story.  But now, as it’s about to be born into the world, I love it!  It turned out to be a story of hope, and I feel quite triumphant that I achieved it. I feel… excited about what lies ahead in my journey with my new publisher, Boldwood, and grateful to all the readers who’ve patiently stuck with me and are waiting to see what I came to at the end of this journey.

My hope is that you will enjoy it, maybe even love it too. My hope is that it will make you think, make you feel, and most importantly help you to remember what it is you truly love about being alive. It’s where hope lies.

Much love for now,

Giselle xx

 

 

 

 

So,  The Girl You Forgot is finally here – August 11th!

Available to order in all formats including Audio, from  Amazon also from Kobo, Googleplay, and  Apple.

Also available to order from Waterstones

After waiting this long – are you really going to want to miss out? 

Please let me know how you enjoy it!

A big Thank you to the following reviewers for reading/blogging on The Girl You Forgot… you may want to check out what they’ve said. Links below!

BeingAnne book blog

SuesBookReviews .

Kraftireader

Bookshine and Readbows 

My Chestnut Reading Tree 

Hina loves to Read

Books with wine and chocolate

All my best wishes,   Giselle x

Here’s another review by the lovely Anne at Books And Authors, copied with permission.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 August 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Writing this on 24^th March 2020 – in the strange, sad and confused days we are facing as Britain enters a period of ‘lockdown’ – I will admit I’ve hesitated for a few days before writing this post. It seems so wildly inappropriate to talk or even think about such a trivial thing as a ‘book’ when such a crisis is upon us, and so many people are scared and suffering.

And yet… so many of the (fictional) people I have always written about, were feeling just that.  Scared, suffering, and with no sense – at least initially – of how they would get through whatever they were going through in their world.  In the world of story, writers get to wave a magical wand so we can ‘make’ everything all right.  Not always as easy a task as it might seem, but the end goal is always the same – to give readers the sense that, however badly disrupted our world becomes, we can get through it.  The worthy task of the writer, therefore, is to offer entertainment, distraction, ideas and information and maybe most important of all… to offer the reader some Hope.

It’s where I began, back in 2006/7 when I wrote Pandora’s Box… a story about a mother and her daughter who each go out in their own ways looking for hope… and end up finding love. Five novels followed but the fact is, it’s now been four long years since I brought out the last one, Dear Dad.  For so many reasons, the next novel didn’t seem to want to be written the way I knew it needed to be. It proved so challenging and for so long, that I really wanted to give up. So many times. However, I didn’t!

What kept me going?

This one little fact: having dedicated each of the other six books to a family member, the only one left was my youngest, Andrew. I couldn’t leave him as the only one without a book dedicated to him! I had to plough through with the seventh novel, because it really meant something to me that he should have one, too.

Finally, after four long and challenging years, I can reveal I have just signed a three-book contract with Boldwood Books and my seventh novel will at last be published in all formats (including audio) in September 2020.

To these experienced and knowledgeable publishers who kept the faith in me, I offer a big ‘Thanks!’ And if there’s any lesson to be drawn from this maybe it’s that Hope doesn’t fly in out of the air like a virus… it comes only when we stand our ground and keep fighting for something that is meaningful to us.

For now, confined to barracks as we all are, I have people and worlds to create, fiendish plots to hatch and at the end of it all, a magic wand to wave… the bit where characters can choose (or not) to adapt, view change and challenge as opportunity and forge onwards, just like the rest of us.

For now, stay safe. Be calm and purposeful. Remain hopeful.

Giselle xx

 

 

I’ve spent the last fifteen months writing a book that begins with an ending.

It’s a book about a woman who, forced to make two contradictory promises, finds herself in an impossible double-bind. You just know, once she’s forced to choose which one she’s going to keep, that it’s going to hurt. It’s a book about an issue for our times – Identity – and how can we still know who we really are, when everything meaningful that’s gone to make up our life has been swept away?

It’s a book about love and loss, and finding the courage to move on with our arms open. It’s a book about Faith.

 

And, boy, has it taken some faith to stay in there, writing this one. I’d thought I’d completed this story in the spring, but it turned out it was nowhere near done. After five further months of blood, sweat and tears, it is done, now!

Lastly, from its wobbly and unsure inception, it has turned into a love story. Three years ago, chancing upon a moving article about the effects of memory loss on our relationships, a really big question was sparked off in me: can the heart really remember, even when the mind’s forgotten?  I still don’t know the answer  to that one, but I know what I’d like to believe. I hope, one day in the not-too-distant future, you’ll get a chance to see what I made of it.

All my best, for now,

Giselle xxx

 

 

Even the longest journey must begin with a single step, they say, but… what if when you start off, you’re headed in the wrong direction?

Trawling through some photos recently, I came across this –

– the suede-bound notebook, with its thick, creamy pages and golden decoration was purchased in Florence the previous year. Back then, full of excitement, I’d wanted a special book to fill with notes and ideas for my new story.  Visiting Michelangelo’s tomb in the church of Santa Croce, I read somewhere that, in carving David, he felt he’d been simply ‘freeing the angel from the marble.’  I knew what he meant.  It felt to me from the beginning that my story too, was already there. Waiting for me to write it. Somehow though, despite my head being full of what I wanted to write – the essence of it, at least – the actual story had refused to come through.

It perplexed me.

Here was I, raring to go, and there was this great idea humming in my head but I somehow couldn’t land it. Putting the special notebook aside, I came home and filled whole exercise books with copious notes. I tried for months!  I spent a lot of time pursuing other activities too. I’d leave it be for weeks, months even and come back to it periodically but still, despite writing many tens of thousands of words over that time, I knew that there was some ineffable ingredient missing in the mix; something that I hadn’t quite crystallised yet. I knew it was missing, that it had to be there; that it had been there for all the others… but… what was it?

I began to wonder if I’d stumbled into the dreaded ‘writer’s block,’ but then, how could that be so? I was penning many short stories for women’s magazines during the year when I couldn’t write this book, so why was this particular story proving so hard to massage into life?  I wanted to walk away from it so many times, but it wouldn’t let me be.  And I felt inexplicably stuck. Unable to move on with it and also unable to let go.

In the end, after a good year-and-a-bit of what felt – in terms of my novel at least – like faffing around, I chanced upon an editor who finally (and very graciously – thank you Kate!) helped me unlock the doors to this elusive story. She suggested a better place to begin, for one. It turns out, among other things, that I’d been starting the story in the wrong place.

Which brings me to the beginning of this piece.

Had I been wasting my time then, going around in circles? It felt like it at the time, but I doubt that’s true.  The journey of a thousand miles may lead you to a destination only three doors down from you and maybe sometimes that’s exactly where your quest will end? Because the thing is; how can we know what we don’t know till we eventually do know it? So no, I don’t think all those months were wasted: it simply took that long for me to know which direction I needed to be going in!

On a sunny morning when my garden was filled with the glorious scent of jasmine, I took another notebook out into the garden and started the novel all over again.

I’m delighted to say that – eight months later – I’ve now typed The End.  First draft done, at least.

Now a new journey – to get it out there to you, my readers, beckons ahead…

Wish me Bon voyage!

Giselle xx

Like the angel in the picture, sometimes we just need time to step back in life and think and reflect and recharge. Reading is a pastime that can help us to do that, but it’s usually something we need to ‘fit in’ around everything else.

Now, how’s this for a lovely idea… how would you like to spend three whole days being pampered in luxury surroundings with nothing to do but READ? This is the brilliant opportunity being offered by The Book Analyst Cressida Downing and friend and collaborator Sara Noel, in various venues around the UK for 2018. Part of the package includes the opportunity to spend an evening having dinner with a local author, and I was thrilled to be asked to join their retreat in Sittingbourne, Kent, on March 7th.

I’m looking forward to meeting and chatting with some lovely new readers – there’s only one or two spaces left – might one of them be you?

Further details on the retreat can be found here 

We’ve all heard of ‘judging a book by its cover’… and that’s why it’s so important to choose the cover that will tempt the reader with what’s inside the pages. With that in mind, I’ve given DEAR DAD a makeover … courtesy of the very talented STEVEN BRIGHT… which I hope shows that there’s a very sweet love story going on behind one little boy’s attempts to secure himself a father. I think Steven’s cover says it all. Here it is, just in time for Father’s Day, and with a reduced price for the week leading up to it, you can treat yourselves, girls!

This week I’ve had some very lovely news:

DEAR DAD has made it onto the shortlist for the prestigious  RNA Romantic Novel of the Year 2017 award. 

Every so often a story you’re working on will grab you on a deeper level and you’ll know you’ve found a ‘book of your heart.’ Dear Dad was one of them. I’ll admit, I struggled with it. I lost my way several times. Deceptively simple as the story seems,  at times, it felt devilishly difficult to write.Some of the main characters hid away from me and I had to spend ages coaxing them out. I am not a man and I am not a dad and I have never been anybody’s son. I never even had a solid relationship with my own father to use as a point of reference … so, what did I know? Many times, I wanted to give it up because it felt too hard, and it was all taking tooooo long (two years, in the end).To cap it all, writing a women’s contemporary fiction novel with such a strong male point of view felt risky. Would my female readership identify with my hero Nate? Would anyone pick it up, let alone want to read it?

Still, I persevered.

Because, as I said, it was a book of my heart. Never mind that it had a male protagonist, I wanted to write a novel about Hope and Kindness. I wanted to write about good, old-fashioned Love! In these dark times I still think it’s what the world is crying out for. I am so glad that I stuck it out. And finally, this week, I am so very happy to have been validated in my choice.

I know that all the novels on this short-list are going to be fabulous, enjoyable reads, and I’m honoured my story was chosen to be one of them.

Now it just remains for me to wish the best of luck to all of my fellow ‘Contemporary Romantic Novel’ category contenders … Monday 13th March is going to be an exciting day for all of us!

 

Giselle xx