I have been busy!
PRE ORDER HERE FOR DELIVERY ON 29 JUNE
Hello everyone,
I hope you are all surviving in these strange times. I’m fine, and some of the restrictions are being relaxed this week, so life is beginning to return to the ‘new normal’ as the are calling it. Here in Ireland I think we managed to avoid the worst of the pandemic, through the prudent and cautious management of the situation by our government, for which we are (mostly) all grateful.
So in the lockdown I have been very busy!
When I wrote The Star and the Shamrock I had no idea how it was going to be received. Writing about WW2 was something I was familiar with, but to write from the prospective of Jewish children was a departure for me, and I was conscious of how important it was to get it right.
The research on the Kindertransport was long and sometimes difficult, in the sense that reading testimonies of people whose parents were able to put them on that train was harrowing, as a writer and a historian, but above all as a mother myself. I was regularly in tears.
Writing about Liesl and Erich, Ariella and Elizabeth however, was so satisfying for me. I have often told you before I do not believe that the stories I write come from me as such, more that they come through me. I believe that the stories all exist in the world already, love, loss, grief, revenge, passion, fury, kindness, laughter, mothers, fathers, lovers, siblings, friends, and all the permutations of those relationships, all of it exists in our collective consciousness, and writers are the people lucky enough to channel those stories into books that make sense for their time and place.
So the Bannon children came to me and I told their story as best I could. The book was a huge success for me, it resonated with people in a way that other books I’d written didn’t, it seems to have affected readers as deeply as it affected me as a writer.
I think it is because of several factors. Maybe it’s because readers cant help but imagine themselves in that situation, and wonder if they could put their precious children on a train, not knowing where they would end up, or with whom, to save their lives? Or maybe its because we all crave proof of the belief that no matter how horrible the situation there are always good people willing to be brave and stand up against injustice? Or maybe it’s just the idea of a little boy and a little girl, facing a world they don’t understand but sticking together. I don’t know, but those books, The Star and the Shamrock and The Emerald Horizon, have had more readers, than all of my other books combined.
And so, on the 29th of June, the third book in that series will be published. It begins in 1950. The war is over and Liesl and Erich are grown up and are getting on with their lives, but the dark shadows of the past cannot let them go, and a chance encounter brings them all right back to Berlin in 1939. Things that were certainties are now only possibilities, and they have to learn the hard way that in wartime, nothing is as it seems.
It is still with my editor and will be going to the advance team shortly. In the meantime you can preorder it to be delivered as an ebook on launch day by clicking the blue button below, but don’t worry, it will also be available as a paperback, and a large print paperback on that day as well.
Until the next time, be safe and take care,
Le grá agus buiochas,
Jean xx