For this post I am signing over to novelist Samantha Priestley and I am so pleased to be able to host her as she blog hops along on her blog tour. Her new book. A Bad Winter, is out soon and I, personally, cannot wait to read it! Her book launch is taking place on Thursday 21st September at the Rutland Arms in Sheffield for a 7.30pm start, so if you're able to make it do go along and meet the lovely author and buy her wonderful book!
So, over to Samantha. If you have any questions or comments for Samantha do ask and I'm sure she will do her best to answer them.
I’ve been spending time
over in the Peak District, close to where I live in Sheffield, all my life. I
have an early memory of being there with my dad and brother one day and dad
showing us where clear water runs from the hills. I have a photo of me and my granddad,
me aged about 6, him leading me around great boulders of rocks on a hillside.
And as a teenager, a group of us would catch the bus out there in summer and
walk through streams and drink cider in the sun. I caught a bus out there on my
one once when I’d finished my O levels, needing to get away and be by myself in
the one place I knew I could find peace. So it’s no surprise that this place
has cropped up in a book.
A Bad Winter is my fifth book and my first ghost story,
and it all started with a snippet of a local story from the Peak District. When
I read about the murder of a young woman in Hill Head House in 1760 in
Bradwell, which is no longer standing, and the strange events that followed,
the idea for the book began. The book runs between 1760 and modern day, telling
the story of what happened to Sarah Vernon and the people of the village, and
what happens to Lorraine when the events of 1760 meet with her own life today.
It’s about love and what it drives us to do, the power of belief, and of
course, ghosts!
When I first decided to
write a ghost story, I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I’d get, but my editor
at Armley Press was instantly supportive and suggested that this was a natural
progression for me. Thinking about it, he’s right, all of my previous books do
contain ghosts, the presence of someone no longer living who haunts the
characters, it was just that this was the first time I’d actually brought the
ghost out and into the story.
One of the main themes of the story is belief, which is a
tricky one. Belief can make us do all kinds of things, it’s a powerful force,
and people use this powerful tool to make others do things too. Whether you
believe in ghosts or not, the mere suggestion of a presence can cause us to act
differently.
So I’d like to throw this post open to you now. Do you
believe in ghosts? Have you had a ghostly experience? Write me a comment below
or ask me a question and I’ll get back to you x
A Bad Winter -
When does passion turn to
love? When does responsibility mean guilt? When does a death become a murder?
In A Bad Winter these
hefty questions stir up echoes through time, from the eighteenth to the
twenty-first century, to create an intimate and powerful tale of personal lives
in freefall. With her trademark pictorial prose and beautifully phrased
metaphors, novelist Samantha Priestley has created a ghostly romance set among
wintry Derbyshire hills, and a shivering good read.
I'm not entirely sure I believe in ghosts. There are things we don't fully understand and probably things we haven't discovered yet, so I'm not entirely ruling the idea out. Whether ghosts exist or not, I do enjoy reading and writing ghost stories.
ReplyDeleteMe, neither, Patsy but I do love a good ghost story!
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