Crowvus Book Blog

Christmas is coming, it's only four days away! For someone who loves Christmas so much, the festival and celebration of Christmas does not feature in as many of my books as I would have expected. All the same, I've drawn together a couple of snippets concerning Christmas from various stories I've written, and I present them to you now as my #HistFicThursdays offering (you can also find a couple from Beneath Black Clouds and White here , as well as last year's offerings here ). Philip was almost grateful of the laborious journey, as it numbed his body to the pains which lay ahead. Instead, he concentrated all his thoughts on the imminent arrival of Advent. It had always been his favourite season of the church’s year. The coming of peace. And he was ready for peace. ~ from The Year We Lived The presents were distributed by Hamish and Roger and all those present had a gift matched perfectly to their recipient. The day continued with games and carols, for which Catherine ac...

  For this week's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm thrilled to be sharing the wonderful book  The Fortune Teller of Katmandu  by  Ann Bennett ,   as part of her  Coffee Pot Book Club  tour. In her guest post, Ann shares her approach to research. But first, let's meet the book... Blurb A sweeping wartime tale of secrets and love, mystery and redemption, moving from the snow-capped Himalayas to the steamy heat of battle in the Burmese jungle. Perfect for fans of Dinah Jeffries, Victoria Hislop and Rosie Thomas. Hampshire, UK, 2015. When Chloe Harper’s beloved grandmother, Lena dies, a stranger hands her Lena’s wartime diary. Chloe sets out to uncover deep family secrets that Lena guarded to her grave. Darjeeling, India, 1943, Lena Chatterjee leaves the confines of a strict boarding school to work as assistant to Lieutenant George Harper, an officer in the British Indian Army. She accompanies him to Nepal and deep into the Himalayas to recruit Gurkhas for th...

 This month, the Historical Writers Forum  are running #HistFicXmas on Twitter. Today's prompt asks whether writers prefer writing about summer or winter, so I thought I'd take that as this week's #HistFicThursdays blog post! As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I love winter. Yes, it is brutal and difficult, but there is nothing more beautiful than hoar frost on trees and spiders' webs, nor is there anything more exciting than a thick covering of snow. But to write about? I actually fell in love with writing about fog. I remember, some 14 years ago, when I first realised how enthralling the effects of fog were, how you hear things long before you see them, and how all your other senses - and there are a lot more than five - band together to compensate for that one missing sense. So, in terms of weather, fog gets my vote! One of my most enduring literary refences to fog is in A Christmas Carol , and so I always link city fog to Christmas. I'm sure there's ...