If you enjoyed Bones and Quicksand, you'll love this!

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Kindle edition available now on Amazon.

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Sometimes a love story needs more than a lifetime..

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Three generations.  Three broken loves.  One magical landscape. 1937: Lew and Hania: a love interrupted by WWII.  1992: Renata and Ula: a love born from adversity and never acknowledged.  2011: Leo and Elka: a love that must be forbidden. 

Margaret Thwaite is the connection between them, but who is she and can she transcend time to resolve the story?

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A literary family saga, set on a Lake District peninsula in Morecambe Bay, ebbing and flowing in time, with a glitter of magical realism inspired by the landscape.  Historical and contemporary romance and something else altogether.  An extraordinary tale of migration, salvaged families and the search for home.

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"A romantic place, the bay.  A gasp, a tongue, slowly running its way along a lip, an open mouth, waiting for a kiss.  How many people have fallen in love on these shores?  Fallen, deep, allowing themselves to be submerged, ignoring the warning signs, giving themselves up to fate?"

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Kindle edition available on Amazon now.

 

"The retreating tide leaves shallow teardrop pools across her sandy cheek, exposing scars of crumbled rock.  Look closely and you will see the lines, freckles and folds of a woman’s face"

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A very personal project

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Once Upon A Place is the novel I have been burning to write.  Something beautiful and full of hope that reflects the magic and infinite possibility of the bay.  A book that is ambitious and lyrical, but still an accessible and compelling read.

 

The central storyline grew from my play Quicksand, which some of you may remember from The Dukes Playhouse in Lancaster or Theatre By The Lake in Keswick. The novel takes the story into a wider context, using the bay to create both the backdrop and the structure.  Elka and Leo's fledgling romance is now part of more epic story of love and loss spanning three generations . 

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"Time has layers.  You have only to look at the sky reflected in the sea that pools over the sands to know this must be true. 

The bay bides her own time."

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This is not a love story in the classic sense (my work never is), but it is as story filled with love of many kinds.  Also loss, betrayal, danger and guilt, but ulitmatey, love.  Love will always find a way.

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"Morecambe shimmers like a promise, a sassy chorus girl, with peachy thighs and bright eyes, but her stockings are laddered, make-up cakes in the folds of her aging flesh"

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I have published digital first to tie in with another bay story, Bones, which was broadcast on Radio 4 at 2.15pm on 28th September 2020. 

 

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"There is a melody in this geography. Along the fringes of wild Sea Wood, past Baycliff.  The Scars: Wadhead, Elbow, Moat, Newbiggin, Leonard and Point Of Comfort.  The Sands: Roosebeck, Rampside, Snab and Biggar.  The Islands: Roa, Foulney, Sheep and Piel.  And on through Bass Pool to Haws Point and South End Haws Nature Reserve.  This landscape sings.  So many stories.  Stories upon stories,  of lovers and others.  Another verse and another and back to the chorus, over and over. Constant flux.  Nothing is stable.

And on Ramsden Road, something is cooking…."

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Kindle Edition available now on Amazon.