November Releases

Margaret James THE SILVER LOCKET
Choc Lit
1st November
£7.99 (paperback)

As the First World War gets under way, Rose Courtenay runs away from home to become an army nurse, falls in love with a married man, and has to make many difficult choices.

Sue Moorcroft WANT TO KNOW A SECRET?
Choc Lit
1 November 2010
£7.99
Money and love? Which matters most?

Karen Abbott A LOVE WORTH WAITING FOR

F. A. Thorpe Linford Romance Series - Large Print

November 2010

Cost - £8.99

Jasmine Jones gets the opportunity to open a Teashop in the lovely village

of Manorbier in Pembrokeshire -- but when disturbing things begin to happen,

Jasmine wonders who wants her business to fail...surely not local artist

Rhys Morgan ?

Trisha Ashley TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
Avon HarperCollins
October 28th
Cost 6.99
For widow Holly Brown, looking after a remote house on the Lancashire moors seems the perfect way to escape the festivities - but when the owner unexpectedly returns just before a blizzard cuts the village off, the Twelve Days of Christmas take a very unexpected turn.

Annie Burrows A COUNTESS BY CHRISTMAS (in anthology "Regency Mistletoe and Marriages"
which also contains story by Joanna Maitland, "The Earl's Mistletoe Bride")
Mills and Boon
November 2010
£6.99
Two sparkling regency romances, set during the Christmas season

Lynne Connolly UNBROKEN
Total E-Bound
November 8th 2010
Cost TBA
Zoltan's looking for imperfection, and he finds it in Vashti.

























Dilly Court A MOTHER’S SECRET
Arrow
4 November 2011
£19.99
Raised in a notorious East End baby farm, Cassy thinks that the Indian woman
who saves her from the gutter is her mother, but she has yet to learn the
secret of her birth.

Liz Fielding MISTLETOE AND THE LOST STILETTO
Harlequin "Romance"
$4.50 US
With the entire world hunting for Lucy, hiding out in Santa's Grotto seemed like a good idea. Ho, ho, ho...

Liz Fielding A STRANGER'S KISS
Linford Romance Library
November, £8.99
Tara takes refuge with a stranger to avoid a stalker.  Out of the frying pan into the roasting pan...

June Francis SUNSHINE AND SHOWERS
Allison & Busby Ltd.
8th November,
£7.99
Patsy Doyle is settled into her role as live-in-maid to the Tanners'
household whilst Joy Kirk is busy planning her wedding but have both let themselves in for more than they bargained?

Kate Harrison THE SECRET SHOPPER UNWRAPPED
Orion
November 11
£6.99
Sandie, Emily and Grazia are on the warpath, exposing shocking Christmas shopping experiences, while they try to juggle love lives, family sagas and sabotage as December 25 approaches...

Anna Jacobs PERSONS OF RANK
Magna Large Print
15 November, 2010
£20.99
Regency romance: The dowager believes people of rank should not fall in love but her granddaughter and niece can’t help themselves, which brings a tangle of complications.

Jan Jones THE PENNY PLAIN MYSTERIES (Part 1 of 4: The Jigsaw Puzzle)
Four-part serial
People's Friend (weekly magazine)
Starts 24th November 2010 (Issue dated 27.10.10)
85p or thereabouts
A jigsaw from the past propels Penny to a puzzling future.

Freda Lightfoot ANGELS AT WAR
Allison & Busby Ltd.
November 2010
£19.99
Racked with guilt over the tragic death of her sister Maggie, Livia promises never to let anyone down again and to do something worthwhile with her life.

Freda Lightfoot HOUSE OF ANGELS
Magna large print
October 2010
£20.99
The Angel sisters struggle to escape their bullying father and find an
unexpected half-sister.

Freda Lightfoot HOSTAGE QUEEN
ebook
November 2010
£6.99 +VAT
In a court rife with murder, political intrigue, debauchery, jealousy and
the hunger for power, can Marguerite de Valois hope to keep her head.
























Chrissie Loveday FROM THIS DAY ON
Ulverscroft Linford Romance Large Print
November 2010
£8.99
Set in a Cornish village, misogenist male doctor meets his new female locum
and sparks fly ... but they reckon without his aunt who's a bit of witch.

Sue Moorcroft STARTING OVER
Isis (Large Print hardback)
1 November 2010
£20.95
New home, new friends, new love. Can starting over be that simple?

Sue Moorcroft ONE SUMMER IN MALTA
Isis
01 November 2010
£11.99
Tina has only one opportunity to spend a summer in Malta. Shame the past is waiting for her there.

























Gillian Villiers TOMORROW’S PROMISE
Thorpe Large Print
1 November 2010
Cost - £8.99
Lara is determined never to risk falling in love, but when she takes up a
new post and agrees to share a house with laid-back fellow teacher Mick, she
finds it isn’t quite so simple.


SHORT STORIES

Kate Jackson THE CIRCLE OF LIFE
Short Story
Peoples Friend Christmas Special
DC Thomson
28th October
£2.99
Christmas will never be same again without Grace.

Happy Birthday RNA

Yesterday the Romantic Novelists' Association celebrated its 50th birthday in style with a lunch at the RAF Club to launch FABULOUS AT FIFTY.

Here are a few photos of the event...

Rosy Thornton Talks About Food and Romance

Food and romance: they just go together, don’t they? Like strawberries and cream, or champagne and caviar, they are each other’s perfect complement. What could be better than curling up on the sofa with a good romantic novel and a box of Belgian chocolates?

Both of them engage our sensual side. So perhaps it is no wonder if food plays a significant part in the pages of romantic fiction. What could be more alluring than the sexy hero preparing a sumptuous meal for the heroine? Than the two of them sharing a candlelit dinner, and feeding each other across the table with their fingers?

When I decided to set a novel in rural France, it was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that the local cuisine – along with the landscape – should form a major strand in the atmosphere of the book. The Tapestry of Love tells the story of divorcee Catherine Parkstone, who sells her house in England and moves to a remote hamlet in the Cévennes mountains to set up in business as a seamstress. Her intriguing neighbour Patrick Castagnol, who lives in the house across the little valley from her own, prepares for her dishes in the local peasant tradition, using the produce of the those wooded hills: chestnuts and forest raspberries, trout from the mountain streams, wild mushrooms and wild boar. In turn, she roasts spatchcocked guinea fowl for him with rosemary from her garden, and serves him a fruit tart made with tiny Mirabelle plums which she picks from her terraced orchard.        

The meals which Patrick cooks for Catherine (and vice versa) became, for me, as real and vivid as the characters themselves. When the novel was done, I found that I wanted to recreate the meals for myself, just as Catherine and Patrick had prepared them. So I set about turning the dishes from the pages of the book into reality… and produced, in the process, a set of cévenol recipes to accompany the novel!

I have already shared the recipes with family and friends who have read the book and wanted to give them a try. If any RNA blog readers would like to have a go at conjuring your own taste of the Cévennes, I’d love to share them with you, too. Just send me a message via my website at

http://rosythornton.com/contact/contact.php

and I’ll be delighted to e-mail you the recipe booklet.     

Fabulous at Fifty

50 glorious years of the Romantic Novelists’ Association

On Thursday Fabulous at Fifty, a memoir of the first half century of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA), will be launched at the RAF Club in London.  Fabulous at Fifty delves into the past, with first-hand recollections of people who were there, and describes the growth of the Romantic Novelists’ Association into what was described by PD James at a recent Awards ceremony as ‘one of most professional writers’ organisations of the present day’.

The history is packed with fascinating and frank detail about past and present members, the opinion of other novelists (often less than flattering) about this massively successful commercial genre, the changing attitude to sex and a public  broadside from Marje Proops in the Mirror plus the spats, the flaps, the End of Publishing as we Know It (1968), hot books and cold champagnes.

The book will be published by the RNA on 14th October at £9.99 and available from their website www.romanticnovelistsassociation.org

October Releases

Julie Cohen GETTING AWAY WITH IT

Headline Review

28^th  October 

£19.99 (hardback) 

Rebellious stuntwoman Liza Haven finds out what it's like to be the good twin when her perfect identical sister disappears.

Rosy Thornton THE TAPESTRY OF LOVE

Headline Review

14th October (paperback)

£7.99

A rural idyll: that's what Catherine is seeking when she sells her house in England and moves to a tiny hamlet in the Cévennes mountains. Reality, however, proves rather different.

Valerie Holmes CHLOE’S FRIEND
F A Thorpe (Publishing)

Large Print
1^st October
£ 8.99 

Forced to work as a laundry maid, her father has been transported and her mother sent away, the young and spirited Chloe must make her way alone - or so she thinks...'

Janet Woods PAPER DOLL
Severn House
28^th  October
£19.99
Set in the 1920s, perfect daughter, Julia, become a perfect wife – until she falls in love with Martin Lee-Trafford.

Lesley Cookman MURDER IMPERFECT

Accent Press Ltd

£6.99

The seventh of the Libby Sarjeant adventures.

Mary Nichols LORD PORTMAN’S TROUBLESOME WIFE
Mills & Boon
£3.99
Homeless and penniless, Rosamund is forced to marry Harry, Lord
Portman. In return for a comfortable life, she must produce an heir. 
But far from sweeping her into his bed, Harry seems determined to keep
her at arm's length.

Lily Baxter POPPY'S WAR

Arrow

28^th  October 2010

Cost £5.99

Evacuated from London's East End, thirteen-year-old Poppy

Brown enters another world when she is billeted at a grand country house in Dorset.

Gwen Kirkwood HEART OF THE HOME

Severn House
30^th October
£19.99 (US $28.95)
Avril Gray has a promising career until fate intervenes. Dean Scott has ambitions but as a labourer he feels unable to propose marriage. His mother learns Avril's secret and is determined to keep them apart

Helen Scott Taylor A MIDWINTER FANTASY
Dorchester
1^st October
£5.99
Fantasy anthology including stories by Leanna Renee Hieber, L.J. McDonald and Helen Scott Taylor.

Carol Townend HER BANISHED LORD

Mills & Boon

Large Print

October

£14.50 

Disgraced, stripped of his title and lands, all Hugh Duclair has left is his pride.   Will the beautiful Lady Aude, once a childhood playmate, win his heart as she risks everything to help clear his name?

Nicola Cornick WHISPER OF SCANDAL
HQN Books
28^th September
£5.72
Love in a cold climate - Regency historical romance and adventure in London and the Arctic!

Cat Marsters DREAMING OF YOU
Changeling Press (ebook)
29th Oct
Approx £3
Two thousand years ago, Tamenorix of the Segovantes was cursed to live forever as a slave, providing pleasure to whoever wears his torc. A torc bought centuries later by a lovelorn academic for his best friend's birthday.

Annie Burrows THE VISCOUNT AND THE VIRGIN

Mills & Boon
1^st October
£6.99
Continuing the Regency Silk and Scandal Series...Imogen Hebden has the shadow of scandal hanging over her.  Just when it looks as though her last-chance season is going to be a disaster, she gets a proposal from no less a personage than a viscount...in an almost indecent hurry to produce an heir...

Lynne Connolly TEXAS HEAT
Loose-Id
5^th October
$5.50
After days of steamy passion locked in her hotel room with the devastatingly sexy Vin, Annie discovers he owns the company trying to take over her own. Can she overcome his distrust and teach him to share his worries, or is sex all they can share?

Jo Beverley EMILY AND THE DARK ANGEL (Reissue)
NAL, NY
October
$8.70
Everyone in the area is warning Emily Grantwich about her
scandalous new neighbor, but as she's running her crippled father's estate,
what's she to do?

Kate Walker KATE WALKER’S 12 POINT GUIDE TO WRITING ROMANCE (3rd edition)
Aber Publishing
30^th  October
£10.99

Award winning guide to writing romance, revised and reprinted

 

Kate Jackson GO FLY A KITE

People's Friend Special Collectors Edition 2010

16^th  September

£4.99

What can Marianne do with a three year old, a kite and no wind?

Kate Jackson A FRIEND IN NEED

People's Friend magazine

2^nd  October

85p

What's the secret behind Charlie Harmer?

Margaret Blake A FATAL FLAW
Whiskey Creek Press
October
$16.95 print –e-book $6.99
Can Kerensa really trust a copy with the mystery of why her mother shot her father?

Chrissie Loveday ROUGH CLAY

Chivers Large Print
4^th October

£16.50

In the early 20th century Potteries, Archie Barnett follows his dream to become a creator of beautiful things, namely fine bone china but dealing with life is the usual roller coaster.

Chrissie Loveday A LOVE SHARED
DC Thompson

People's Friend Pocket Novels
7^th October
£1.75
Their shared passion for horses brings Sarah and Alex together but working together in their law firm brings conflict that may prove impossible to overcome.

Kate Jackson DATES FOR MY DIARY

People's Friend Annual 2011

16^th  August

£6.99

An unexpected present helps Amanda start afresh.