Coming soon…
It’s less than three weeks until my new novel – One Last Summer – is published. I can’t tell you how excited I am for you all to read this story and I’m thrilled to share the cover with you here. My publisher has given me a fresh new look and I love it!
Publication date: 5 February 2019
UK readers click here to pre-order
The Heart of the Garden – just £1 in the UK
Now is a great time to grab a garden bargain! The third novel in my English Country House and Garden series – The Heart of the Garden – is just £1 on Amazon in the UK.
Here’s a bit more about the book:
Morton Hall, with its beautiful, ruined grounds and its reclusive mistress, Emilia Morton, is full of mysteries. For freelance editor Anne Marie, the wild garden has become a serene and secret refuge from her loveless marriage. The only other regular visitor is Cape, the hall’s part-time gardener, who is forbidden to tend to anything except the magnificent maze or to meet his enigmatic employer.
When Emilia dies, Cape and Anne Marie are astonished to find themselves among an unlikely group of villagers named in her strange will. Morton Hall, including its dazzling art collection and once glorious grounds, can belong to the community forever, but only if they work together to bring the garden back to life within a single year.
As they try to put their differences aside to restore the tangled grounds, long-buried secrets are unearthed. Can the past be forgiven as hope and new love begin to bloom?
Christmas reads
I do love a Christmas story. There’s something so special about snuggling up on the sofa by the fireside and losing yourself in a festive tale. Perhaps that’s why I’ve written six Christmas stories of my own!
And this year’s Christmas novella – The Christmas Rose – is very special indeed as we journey back to Suffolk to find out what’s been happening to the Rose Girls. I had so much fun returning to Little Eleigh Manor, and let me tell you something – it looks so very beautiful in the snow!
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my readers for your support this year – for buying my books, for leaving reviews and for keeping in touch on my social media sites. I love hearing from you all and I wish each and every one of you a very Merry Christmas!
New arrivals at Mulberry Cottage
I’m delighted to introduce our new flock of gorgeous hens: Portia, Phoebe and Perdita. Named after Shakespearean heroines, they are four-month-old pure breeds and are the gentle giants of the hen world.
Portia is a Buff Orpinton – the breed made famous by the late Queen Mother. She’s the most timid in the flock at the moment and is very vocal whenever I pick her up!
Phoebe is a Black Orpington. She likes jumping up on things and was the first to discover the back door into our house!
And Perdita is a Blue Partridge Brahma. She’s the most dominant of the little flock and was the first to climb up and down the ladder into the coop and the first to eat from my hand. She’s very curious and alert.
The girls are enjoying free-ranging in the autumn garden, but are sticking closely together at the moment as they get to know their new environment! They’re such gorgeous girls and I can’t wait to get to know their personalities and enjoy plenty of hen cuddles with them.
Thank you to Stephen and Carole at The Hen House Garden Company. We love our girls!
The Christmas Rose – out now!
I’m thrilled to be launching my Christmas novella today – The Christmas Rose.
It’s a seasonal sequel to The Rose Girls and I hope readers will love venturing back to Little Eleigh Manor in time for all the festivities and finding out what happened next to Celeste and Julian, Evie and baby Alba and – reader favourites – Esther and Frinton the terrier!
Thank you, dear readers!
To each and every reader who has bought a copy of The Rose Girls – whether in ebook, paperback or audio – in English, German, French, Italian or Spanish – thank you! We’ve sold over 200,000 copies and I am absolutely delighted!
Our Viola
Sometimes, a hen comes into your life and can’t help but make an impact. Dear Viola was one of those hens. She came to us in the summer of 2016, with her flock sisters. The Shakespeare Sisters, we called them, and Viola was named after my favourite Shakespeare heroine from Twelfth Night.
But what a state she was in! We’ve never seen a hen look quite as rough. Her comb was overlarge, floppy and pale, her wings looked like chopsticks and she was missing so many feathers that she looked almost oven-ready.
However, appearances can be deceptive and she soon proved to be a feisty little girl, marching up and down the run of the coop, asking to be let out to free-range for the first time.
And how she loved to free-range! So much so that she was soon laying eggs in the hedge and venturing through the hedge into our neighbours’ gardens! She also loved sneaking into the house whenever the door was open, leaping onto our chair in the conservatory and sticking her head in any bags of food around. She really was an adventurer!
Winter weather didn’t faze her even though she was a sun-worshipper at heart. In fact, I’ve never seen a hen enjoy sunbathing so much and, in the early days of her release, we had to put sun lotion on all those bare bits of hers!
I loved looking out of the kitchen window to see her leaping on to pots and bins and sneaking around the oil tank. One never quite knew where she’d appear next.
Darling Vi. You were such a special girl and I hope you loved your retirement with us as much as we loved having you as a part of our family. You’ll be missed so much.
The Heart of the Garden just 99p
I have a treat for UK readers this September – the third book in my Country House and Garden trilogy – The Heart of the Garden – is just 99p for the ebook on Amazon.
And here’s one of my author copies surrounded by beautiful blooms gathered at the Floral Abundance course I attended yesterday at a wonderful walled garden here in Suffolk.
What a joy it was to spend the last day of August surrounded by flowers – all grown within the walls of this Victorian kitchen garden.
We learnt some flower theory in the morning and then we were set lose with a pair of secateurs in the afternoon, filling an enormous bucket with blooms to arrange at home. It was the loveliest day and I felt like one of my own characters from the garden trilogy!
A huge thank you to Anne-Marie who made us all feel so at home in her special world. Do follow her wonderful Instagram account and treat yourself to a course if you can.
Time to Dream…
We all need to make time to dream… to decompress and just breathe…
Which is why we took a much-deserved day off recently and headed to the north Norfolk coast.
We didn’t write and we didn’t paint; we simply walked, paddled, sat and watched. It was heaven!
When you’re self-employed and when your head is full of stories all the time, it’s easy to work right around the clock, but taking time off is so important. I’m learning that now.
We Capture the Castle!
This summer, we had a rather special holiday – in a castle!
We’ve had the great pleasure of staying in a few properties owned by The Landmark Trust, but this was our first castle and what a fabulous experience it was. Situated in the heart of Thomas Hardy country with local walks along the beautiful River Frome, Woodsford Castle lived up to all our expectations.
Of course, it would have been selfish to keep such a special place to ourselves and so we invited some of our writer and artists friends to stay with us and enjoyed good food, good conversation and plenty of country walks.
A highlight of the holiday for me was a visit to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace at Little Bockhampton. I’d first visited as an undergraduate studying his novels, and it was a delight to return to this very special cottage set deep in the Dorset woods.
It had the perfect cottage garden, filled with roses and herbs, and one could easily imagine the young Hardy enthralled by the natural world that surrounded him and which he wrote about so beautifully.
Our Evie
We said a sad goodbye to our darling ex-bat Evie this week after almost three years of retirement with us. Only Mariette and Dotty have hit the golden three years with us, so Evie did very well and never had a day’s illness either.
Evie came to us in September 2015 along with her flock sisters Celeste and Gertie – named after the heroines in my novel The Rose Girls which had been published that summer.
Evie was a brave soul who quickly revelled in her new free-range life and struck up a strong friendship with Gertie. They could usually be found together and would often leap up onto the bin to peep into the kitchen window!
A little bit of a scruff on arrival, Evie soon grew all her feathers back and became a really beautiful hen although, in a recent moult, she lost all her tail feathers and looked very scruffy indeed! But her feathers made a splendid comeback and she looked bonnier than ever!
Always a gentle hen, she quickly teamed up with the younger Viola once she’d lost her long-term pal Gertie. Here’s Evie with Viola enjoying a yoghurty treat together.
We feel so lucky that Evie’s retirement was a long and healthy one with just a gentle slide into old age. But how we shall miss that cheeky face looking in at the kitchen window!
Goodbye, my dear girl. You will be missed.