Blog Tour ~ Secrets We Keep by Faith Hogan

 Jaffareadstoo is delighted to be hosting a stop on the Secrets We Keep Blog Tour

Its a real pleasure to welcome back to Jaffareadstoo the author of Secrets We Keep

Faith Hogan

Today Faith is sharing her thoughts about the Inspiration for Secrets We Keep

I have a confession to make….

As a writer, I’m blessed to be surrounded by inspiration! You see, I live in the west of Ireland – far away from the big city and bright lights. We have the Ballycroy national park just out the road and Beleek woods only a walk away. Our landscape is littered with the remnants of a history both creative and bloody, our folklore lives on in the images and sounds that dominate our pageants and festivals to this day. The Atlantic Ocean sweeps up to our doorstep.

The best novels, for me, are the ones that hand over a starring role to a sense of place. The Nordic writers like Menkell, the Scotts, like Rankin and all the great American’s from Ann Tyler through to Stephen King, have one thing in common and it travels across genres – it is a sense of place.

When it came to writing my second novel, I very much wanted to write something that featured where I live. I wanted to capture a sense of the beauty and community, I wanted to show that love can be a very different thing when you take it away from the distractions of city living and that sometimes, taking away what we think we are can leave us with who we always hoped we might be.

As a child, my mother brought both myself and my sister to the nearby Ennsicrone beach every Thursday during our summer holidays. It was a big deal – our day out. We travelled by bus and it didn’t particularly matter if the sun was shining or if the beach was wetter than the sea – when you’re six, the rain doesn’t really count if you’re having fun.

We would spend hours on the water’s edge, never allowed to go too far because my mother was no great swimmer. Often, we would pitch up on the large flat basalt rocks that are a feature of the beach. Enniscrone has five miles of golden sands – but at its town end, it is perfectly chiselled for picnicking. At our backs – the Cliff Bathhouse, a small white castellated building that always intrigued us. Even then, the bathouse looked as if it had been closed for many years. My mother would say, she could remember it being opened, but then, times change and at some point, a new bathhouse was built on the main road high above the rocks. As with all new buildings, it was bigger, more spacious and more modern and the older building fell into disrepair and closed.

In our childhood, the Cliff Bath House seemed to represent all that was different and alien to this holiday place compared to our own small town existence.

Later, as I got older and we visited Enniscrone with our friends, the Bathhouse still stood there, a silent, squatting overseer, reminding me of those days of innocence and fun. As I got older and began to walk along the beach in all weathers the bathhouse has been a point of focus and very often, we would talk of the possibilities that it might present, if one had the time or the energy or the opportunity.

It was one evening as I was walking back along the beach that I realised, I do have the opportunity to do something for the Cliff Bathhouse. I could make it come alive again – in my own way and from there I began to see what it might be, then it was all about who could put things right and that’s when Kate Hunt came along… 

About the book...

Head of Zeus
1 February 2017

Two distant relatives, drawn together in companionship are forced to confront their pasts and learn that some people are good at keeping secrets and some secrets are never meant to be kept..

A bittersweet story of love, loss and life. Perfect for the fans of Patricia Scanlan and Adele Parks.

The beautiful old Bath House in Ballytokeep has lain empty and abandoned for decades. For devoted pensioners Archie and Iris, it holds too many conflicting memories of their adolescent dalliances and tragic consequences – sometimes it’s better to leave the past where it belongs.

For highflying, top London divorce lawyer Kate Hunt, it’s a fresh start – maybe even her future. On a winter visit to see her estranged Aunt Iris she falls in love with the Bath House. Inspired, she moves to Ballytokeep leaving her past heartache 600 miles away – but can you ever escape your past or your destiny?

More about Faith

Faith Hogan was born in Ireland.  She gained an Honours Degree in English Literature and Psychology from Dublin City University and a Postgraduate Degree from University College, Galway.  She has worked as a fashion model, an event’s organiser and in the intellectual disability and mental health sector.

She was a winner in the 2014 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair – an international competition for emerging writers.

Her debut novel, ‘My Husband’s Wives,’ is a contemporary women’s fiction novel set in Dublin. It was published by Aria, (Head of Zeus) in 2016.  

‘Secrets We Keep,’ is her second novel out on Feb 1st 2017..  

Find out more on her website by clicking here

Follow on Twitter @GerHogan

Visit on Facebook by clicking here 

You can check out the books on:

Amazon.co.uk   http://amzn.to/2h7Adn6          
Amazon.com      Amazon.com Faith Hogan

Kobo  Kobo Secrets We Keep                                        

iBooks -  http://apple.co/2hBcaQR

Google Play     http://bit.ly/2gS3iVH

Huge thanks to Faith for her guest post today and for the invitation to be part of her blog tour for Secrets we keep. Thanks also to Yasemin at Head of Zeus for all her  help with organising this blog tour.

Tour runs between 1st February and 1st March so do visit the other blogs for more exciting content.

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Blog Hop ~ My Husband's Wives by Faith Hogan

Jaffareadstoo is delighted to be part of 

My Husband's Wives Blog Hop

I am delighted to welcome the author Faith Hogan who is sharing her inspiration for Carlinville, Evie's home in My Husband's Wives...

Photo by kind permission of the author

Carlinville – The Silent Character!

My debut novel – My Husband’s Wives is a book firmly set in Irish soil. The action of the novel takes place in Dublin, and while it’s not the Dublin of Roddy Doyle or Brendan Beehan, it is the Dublin of today. For the most part, it’s middle class suburbia, the home of average people going about ordinary lives.

Evie Considine lives in an old Victorian house, set high in the hills of Howth. Anyone who knows Dublin will know how strikingly beautiful Howth is. From its headland on a clear day, you can see across the Irish Sea into Wales. Along the Dublin coastline, you can pick out the Poolbeg towers, occasional sandy coves and at night, the winking lights of a city steeped in literary tradition. Carlinville, Evie’s home, has retained the beauty of its past, despite Evie’s indifference. It is a place that cries out to be filled with people, smell of beeswax and gleam in the full sun of care and love; it is a house that yearns to be a home. 

 This image of Frewin House  is used with the kind permission of its owners and like Carlinville  House, it too is a fine example of Irish Victorian architecture. 

With Queen Victoria, came a new kind of living. The elite sought to make a mark of their own and built houses like the one featured here. The architecture was softer and more feminine than its predecessors were. It is also less widespread in our capital city than the great red squares of the Georgians.  Dublin city is known mostly for its great Georgian squares. Today, tall, redbrick identical houses, built to a perfect precision in the 1700’s are being opened up around the city, fetching prices now that would have made their original owners blush. Very many have seen the highs and lows of Irish society, beginning as homes to the well to do, but eventually, when they became unfashionable being relegated to the poor. Tenement living in Dublin was at its height in the early twentieth century. By 1912, Dublin had the worst housing conditions in the UK, the wealthy had fled the city centre to set up home in the suburbs and the grand houses of the Georgians became little more than squats with high rents. Huge families living to a room or two, with little in the way of basic sanitary provisions led quickly to the disintegration of those once beautiful squares. The nineteen eighties saw a revival of the squares, but the restoration is slow and expensive, so still there are many Georgian houses in danger of disappearance. Thankfully, the Victorian houses were lucky to have been modish long enough and at the right time to avoid falling out of fashion to the same extent.

Like the women in My Husband’s Wives, Carlinville manages to come to life and its journey in the novel mirrors that of its mistress. It has, for too long been relegated to second place, while always providing what Paul Starr needed in life. In his death, like his wives, it too is gifted with so much more than it expected.

While Dublin features in the novel, it is contemporary Dublin. The liberties, although they are steeped amidst the history of the Vikings are home to a sea of constant traffic, bijoux antique shops and the ubiquitous coffee shops on every corner of every city of the world.

I love Dublin, I think anyone who visits the city, if they have a love of writers or books, will love it. There are landmarks here that mark it apart from any other place in the world. The city begins with the Book of Kells, a stone’s throw away, the house of The Dead, take the dart and you will arrive out at Joyce’s Martello Tower. Every other street has a pub, a doorway or a sculpture to mark the journey of some writer that has touched even the darkest soul. However, My Husband’s Wives is not a story about Dublin – it is a story about jealousy, forgiveness and ultimately love and the truth is, that’s a universal tale. It doesn’t matter if you live in Seattle or Surrey, Sidney or Stephenville – love is love and really it is all we have that is worth having at the end.

Faith  x

Aria Fiction
2016
(Head of Zeus)

A bit of Blurb about the book..

Better to have loved and lost, than never loved.

Paul Starr, Ireland's leading cardiologist dies in a car crash with a pregnant young women by his side.

United in their grief and the love of one man, four women are thrown together in an attempt to come to terms with life after Paul. They soon realise they never really knew him at all.

The love they shared for Paul in his life and which incensed a feeling of mistrust and dislike for each other, in his death turns into the very thing that bonds them and their children to each other forever.

As they begin to form unlikely friendships, Paul's deaths proves to be the catalyst that enables them to become the people they always wanted to be.

About the Author

Faith Hogan was born in Ireland.  She gained an Honours Degree in English Literature and Psychology from Dublin City University and a Postgraduate Degree from University College, Galway.  She has worked as a fashion model, an event’s organiser and in the intellectual disability and mental health sector.

She was a winner in the 2014 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair – an international competition for emerging writers.

Her debut novel, ‘My Husband’s Wives,’ is a contemporary women’s fiction novel set in Dublin. It will be published by Aria, (Head of Zeus) on 1^st of May 2016.   She is currently working on her next novel.  

My Husband’s Wives, was published on 1st of May 2016 by Aria (Head of Zeus). It is currently available on Amazon and all good E-reading sites. She lives in the west of Ireland with her husband, children, a very fat cat called Norris and a selection of (until recently!) idle writerly mugs and cups.

You can find out more about Faith on her website Click here

Find on Facebook Click here

Follow on Twitter @GerHogan

Amazon UK
Amazon.com

Huge thanks to Faith for inviting Jaffareadstoo to be part of this Blog Hop

 and for such a fascinating insight into the inspiration for Carlinsville.

Jaffa and I wish you continued success with your writing.

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