📖 Blog Tour ~ The Collector's Daughter by Gill Paul

  

Thrilled to host one of today's stops on this blog tour

Avon
30 September 2021

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book
and Random Things Tours for the invitation to the blog tour

An unforgettable discovery 

In 1922, Lady Evelyn Herbert’s dreams are realised when she is the first to set foot inside the lost tomb of Tutankhamun for over 3,000 years. 

A cursed life 

But the months after the discovery are marred by tragedy, when Eve’s father dies suddenly and her family is torn in two. Desperate to put the past behind her, Eve retreats into a private life with her new husband. 

A deadly choice 

But she is harbouring a dark secret about what really happened in Egypt. And when a young woman comes asking questions years later, the happiness Eve has finally found is threatened once more....

📖 My Thoughts...

Lady Evelyn Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Carnavon, was actively involved in the discovery of a tomb located in the Valley of the Kings, in Upper Egypt, in 1922. Together with archaeologist, Howard Carter, and her father, Lady Evelyn was one of the first people to enter Tutankhamun's tomb in three millennium. This spectacular discovery is well documented as is the alleged curse of the Pharaohs which seemed  to follow those who had been involved in the excavation.

We first meet Evelyn in 1972 when she is in her early seventies and recovering from a stroke. During her slow recovery she is contacted by a young Egyptian academic who is interested in learning more about some of the artefacts excavated from Tutankhamun's tomb. In a series of imaginative flashbacks we are whisked back to the Egypt of 1922, and experience, with Lady Evelyn, the wonder and joy of this momentous discovery. The dusty ambiance of excavating is brought to life as is the close relationship which flourished between Evelyn, her father, and Howard Carter. As with all moments in history there are secrets which are known only to those who were closely involved, and The Collector's Daughter shines the spotlight on some of those well hidden secrets. 

This fascinating story is based on what little is known about Evelyn, and the author brings to glorious life, not just the enthusiasm which the discovery of the tomb brought but also of the difficulties Evelyn faced in the years afterwards. Her loving relationship with her husband, Sir Brograve Beauchamp, helped to put these challenges into perspective, particularly after the sudden loss of Evelyn’s father in 1923.

Combining historical fact, with beautifully written fiction, The Collector's Daughter has been an absolute joy to read from start to finish.

As an impressionable teenager I queued for many hours in the spring of 1972 to get a glimpse of the glory of Tutankhamun’s treasures. Seeing the London exhibition at the British Museum and the magnificent display of artefacts is something I will never forget.

About the Author

Gill Paul is an author of historical fiction, specialising in the twentieth century and often writing about the lives of real women. Her novels have topped bestseller lists in the US and Canada as well as the UK and have been translated into twenty-one languages. The Secret Wife has sold over half a million copies and is a book-club favourite worldwide. She is also the author of several non-fiction books on historical subjects. She lives in London and swims year-round in a wild pond. The Collector’s Daughter is her tenth novel.

Twitter @GillPaulAUTHOR #TheCollectorsDaughter

@Avon

@RandomTTours

Blog Tour ~ The Second Marriage by Gill Paul

 

 Delighted to host today's stop on this Blog Tour

Avon 
17 September 2020

My thanks to the publishers for my copy of this book
and to Random Things Tours for my invitation to the blog tour

JACKIE

When her first marriage ends in tragedy, Jackie Kennedy fears she’ll never love again. But all that changes when she encounters…

ARI

Successful and charming, Ari Onassis is a man who promises her the world. Yet soon after they marry, Jackie learns that his heart also belongs to another…

MARIA

A beautiful, famed singer, Maria Callas is in love with Jackie’s new husband – and she isn’t going to give up.

Little by little, Jackie and Maria’s lives begin to tangle in a dangerous web of secrets, scandal and lies. But with both women determined to make Ari theirs alone, the stakes are high. How far will they go for true love?

What did I think about it..

The glamorous lifestyle of the rich and famous is vividly portrayed in this fascinating novel which charts the complicated relationship between three very different people. The fabulously wealthy, Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis, is caught between the two women who would play such a vital role in his complicated love life. 

Maria Callas is the world renowned soprano whose attraction to Aristotle is an all consuming passion. We learn of Maria's insecurities about her exceptional talent, her sham of a marriage, and her dangerous attraction for the Greek millionaire who promises her love and passion when she is a lost and lonely wife. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is the world's most famous widow when she is beguiled by Aristotle and the safe haven from the world spotlight that he offers both her and her children. 

In beautifully layered chapters we go back to Jackie Kennedy's life with her charismatic but extremely ambitious first husband, we step into her shoes as First Lady of America, and we learn of her own personal heartbreak as she combines motherhood within the glare of the world's political stage.The author has done an excellent job of bringing together all the different strands of the story, I especially enjoyed how the alternate chapters shone the spotlight on both Maria and Jackie’s complex relationship with Onassis, a man whose personal magnetism proved to be both controlling and manipulative.

The story flows beautifully, weaving known facts with well placed fiction, and definitely bringing to life the absolutely fascinating story of both Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy’s fated relationship with one of world's richest men.

About the Author

Website

Twitter @GillPaulAUTHOR

@AvonBooksUK

@RandomTTours

Sunday WW1 Remembered...Guest Author, Gill Paul

As part of my ongoing tribute during this centenary of WW1, I am delighted to feature the work of some excellent authors who have written about The Great War.

 Please welcome

Gill Paul

Ivy Press
2014

World War One Love Stories

War might seem the antithesis of love, yet it’s a time when love often flourishes, as people who’ve been through horrific experiences seek comfort and perhaps some kind of affirmation that life is worth living. Couples who are already an item at the war’s beginning face huge challenges in the long separations and lack of news then, if reunited, they are often hugely traumatised and changed by what they’ve been through. Wars also bring together people who might not otherwise have met – people of different nationalities and cultures – and that’s always fascinating for an author.

When I was asked to write a book of true World War One love stories, finding the couples was the hardest bit. In order to get any kind of real insight, I needed couples whose correspondence survives, or who wrote a journal or memoir about their wartime experiences, and because it’s an illustrated book I also needed photographs. I wanted the majority of my stories to be about non-famous people so it was important to get permission from living relatives, and the Internet was my first tool for tracking them down. University libraries were valuable resources, because some couples had donated their correspondence to their alma mater, and I found others through war museums, local history museums, and sometimes websites set up by their descendants.

Out of all the relatives I contacted, I only found one man in his eighties who had living memories of the couple I was writing about – his parents, in that case. A hundred years is just too long. How many of us know much about our grandparents’ love lives, never mind our great-grandparents’?

But I had a huge surprise when I came across the letters of a Glaswegian chap called Hugh Mann to his girlfriend Jessie Reid. I liked Hugh immediately for his sense of humour. He could find a joke in virtually anything, writing, for example, that France during wartime was “an entirely unhealthy residential area”. Even when he was given sick leave in 1916 because of a case of recurring boils he wrote to Jessie that it “Was the ideal malady for a person of my sunny disposition because they don’t give me the least pain.”

Hugh and Jessie
By courtesy of the author

Hugh was training to be a minister in the very strict Free Church of Scotland but, scandalously, Jessie fell pregnant during the summer of 1914. His career would have been destroyed if word got out so they had to get married post-haste and she was banished to Sheffield to stay with her married sister until after the birth. It was, wrote Hugh, “something of a debacle”.

As I read their letters to each other, there were many locations and names that rang a bell, and when I got in touch with Hugh’s great-niece it suddenly dawned on me that we are distantly related through my paternal grandmother. That made it personal. I am not going to tell you here what happened to Hugh and Jessie but let’s just say it can still make me cry if I talk about it.

I’ve written three books of wartime love stories, covering the First and Second World Wars and the American Civil War, and I also have a novel, No Place for a Lady, set during the Crimean War, which is about the love stories of two sisters who travelled out there. Each of the four wars was quite different in terms of the locations, the technology and therefore the type of fighting. The love letters were very different as well, with the 19^th-century ones being passionate, flowery and rather formal, while the 20^th-century ones are more chatty in tone, with the affection saved for a few lines at the end. In letters from the trenches in the First World War, British men adopted the characteristic stiff upper lip, and their letters are like postcards home from some rather grim holiday camp, where the food and the weather are particularly dire.

When war was declared in August 1914, everyone thought it would be over by Christmas. The long attrition of trench warfare was completely unexpected and unprepared for. No one had any idea that four years later these men would still be hunkered down in muddy, rat-infested trenches, waiting for a command to go over the top. It was all so new and so terrible. Perhaps that’s what makes their love stories the most poignant of all.

World War I Love Stories is available here: 

Gill’s novel No Place for a Lady is here:

 And her website is here:

If you live in the Cheltenham area, you can hear Gill talking about World War I Love Stories

 at the library next Saturday 6^th February 2016, 4.30–6pm.

 Huge thanks to Gill for sharing her World War I Love stories with Jaffareadstoo. 

It's been a real delight to have you as our guest today.

True love stories have such a poignancy which are made all the more special by the realisation that so many young men didn't return home to their wives and sweethearts.

We will remember them.

~***~