Suz Korb

Any cold that's caught is immediately assumed to be Coronavirus. Well of course it is! We now live in troubled times and this is only the first week finished of homeschooling. We went out for a walk on Thursday and by the evening my teenage daughter had a bad cold. Luckily just a cold, even though she's suffering with super runny nose and sore throat. But we've monitored her temperature daily, amongst other get-well remedies that have been put in place. I got sick yesterday. Couldn't even eat pizza for dinner. I took one look at it on the plate and had to run upstairs and go to bed. Which is where I stayed all night from 7pm - 7am, although really it was 6am as the clocks sprung forward an hour last night. Of course I googled and discovered that in some people vomiting and diarrhoea can be signs of Coronavirus infection!  I feel a bit better today though. Got some work done from home. Ate a banana and had a cup of coffee for breakfast.  Every cough +...

I drive into the car park and pull my Ford Bmax into a space. For a moment I look around noticing there's hardly anyone there. The sun is setting on another clear sky day. Birds fly overhead in flocks and I swear there wasn't normally this many birds in the sky before the pandemic began. Checking the shopping list I stall for the time I have to get myself out of the car. I look at the Alexa app on my phone and add the items to my main shopping list. Finally, after snapping on a pair of disposable gloves, I'm ready to get out of the car. I feel like I'm living in an apocalypse movie. I know it's not chaos out there, but as I look through my car window I swear I can see Coronavirus germs flying up and out of each person that walks by my vehicle. "Let's do this." I motivate myself and open the door. The air is warmer than usual for this time of year in England. And it hasn't rained for weeks. In January we had so much rain there were fl...

Firstly,  Sorry about all the typos. I’m having to dictate this blog entry into my phone Things are going much better today, a much more calm day. Yesterday was crazy, trying to get all the websites from schools to work properly, which they were not. Today were taking things much more slowly. Basically going at the kids’ pace. I am implementing breaks, exercise, chores, food prep, crafts, etc. But we just get to things in between alone time throughout the day in our own rooms. That’s important too. When you’re stuck inside with each other, you need time to yourself. As for my book writing, I’m currently on Supernatural, which is the last book in my super duper series Sorry about all the typos. I’m having to dictate this blog entry into my phone But yeah I’m plugging away at writing supernatural. And I’ve been able to incorporate the current pandemic into this story I’ve also got NVQ studies of my own to do for preschool, and my next module requires a blo...

I realised this really is OUR pandemic. I wrote a tweet about how my newest book is inclusive of OUR current situation, and that's when it hit home with me. We really are in this together as an entire planet. And through my fiction I can use it as a sort of real-life diary. But I want to fictionalise the pandemic as a way of also escaping from the real-life panic, now and then. At the moment I'm also keeping a private journal which basically turns into a memoir the very next day. But at the start of this horrific pandemic I thought there'd be no way to keep writing fiction. I felt afraid and hopeless. As the days pass though, there are not only more deaths and infections, but there are actually positives. And I've had to allow myself to relax into those positives, in order to keep my sanity for my children and loved ones. Life is carrying on, albeit at home. I'm just glad I can escape into my fiction writing now. And the book I'm currently writing is...

Available Here Edinburgh, January 1732: It's Lady Grange's funeral. Her death is a shock: still young, she'd shown no signs of ill health. But Rachel is, in fact, alive. She's been brutally kidnapped by the man who has falsified her death - her husband of 25 years, a pillar of society with whom she has raised a family. Her punishment, perhaps, for railing against his infidelity - or for uncovering evidence of his treasonable plottings against the government. Whether to conceal his Jacobite leanings, or simply to `replace' a wife with a long-time mistress, Lord Grange banishes Rachel to the remote Hebridean Monach Isles, until she's removed again to distant St Kilda, far into the Atlantic - to an isolated life of primitive conditions, with no shared language - somewhere she can never be found. This is the incredible and gripping story of a woman who has until now been remembered mostly by her husband's unflattering account. Sue Lawrence reconstructs a r...

AVAILABLE NOW Fear. That's what comes to mind when Sophie thinks of her childhood. Fear. And pain. She ran away from home to protect her unborn child. Now, twenty years later, she's a woman who learned to put the past and its dark secrets behind her. To stand on her own and to build a good life for herself and her son. But the past is not yet done with her and those dark secrets rise from the grave. Her courage, and the strength of her love will be put to the test. What's on the line is everyone she loves. It's flight or fight and this time she won't run. Happily-ever-after is something Ciana believes in with her whole heart. Love may be a bumpy road and there are bound to be some perils along the way but in the end love should win. She tries to take that attitude into her writing and thinks that love, hope and laughter are some of the best medicine there is. Along with books. She loves to hear from readers and the most important thing she think...

AVAILABLE NOW Guardians of The Realm 1: Aegyir Rises Reagan Bennett has always felt like an outsider. Left at the doors of a hospital at birth, her relationship with her adopted family hasn’t been easy. Especially when one of them almost killed her. Now he’s due to be released from prison and Reagan’s settled world is about to be turned upside-down. But not by him. Something else – something much older, much darker – is also about to be freed. Something that believes Reagan is an arch enemy, and is obsessed with destroying her. All of her life, Reagan has dreamed of living in another place – The Realm. Can these dreams really be memories? If so, who is Reagan Bennett? Reagan needs to figure out who her enemy is, before they slaughter everyone she loves. And to do that, she needs to figure out who she really is.  Amanda Fleet is a physiologist by training and a writer at heart. She spent 18 years teaching science and medicine undergraduates at St Andrews ...

In an autocratic society that refuses to let her move forward, can Poppy stay ahead of the pack?As expensive steam-powered automobiles speed across the land, Poppy Orpington is trapped and going nowhere – until her father reveals his secret project, a petrol-fuelled car ready for the race track. But will they even be allowed to compete?Racing is the preserve of the wealthy elite and few will welcome a working class family onto their hallowed ground. Can Poppy overcome social prejudice and conformity, or will her one and only chance of a better life be crushed before it can even begin?Full Throttle; book one of a Steampunk motor racing adventure set in a world of division, intolerance and inequality that modern readers may find disturbingly familiar…  Jon Hartless was born in the 1970s and has spent much of his life in the Midlands and Worcestershire. His latest novels, a steampunk motor racing adventure examining the gulf between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the...

In the aftermath of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans, the Danube Swabians, were expelled by Tito's Partisan regime. A further sixty thousand were killed. Seventy years later, Marie Kohler's marriage is falling apart. She's seeing someone new, an enigmatic man named David, who takes her to the former Yugoslavia to find the truth behind her grandparent's flight to America. Alternating between the late 1940s and contemporary Serbia, Marie's story is interwoven with those of Tito's victims - a young survivor who has lost his mother and his identity, a woman held captive in a sugar factory, a refugee girl living in Austria under the din of air raid sirens. Marie's journey follows the Danube in search of connection in the face of loss. Connection to the lost souls, to the memory of her grandfather, to the man beside her, to her grandmother suffering Alzheimer's back home. What Remains at the End considers what hap...

AVAILABLE NOW A Modern-Day Fairytale That Will Have Readers Swooning Lily is headstrong, independent, and stuck in a loop of bad luck.  She makes fairy figurines that customers buy to bring them good luck, but her merchandise doesn’t seem to do the same for her. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t believe in them. Theos is handsome and charismatic, a kite-surfing superstar who travels the world.  So why is he drawn to Lily and the store on a California beach she struggles to keep afloat? And could she be the one to trigger the awakening of his unusual destiny?

When I start a new manuscript I often give up on it. At times like these I have to remember that I can come back to it when I realise something that should or should not be in there. For example, yesterday I got stuck writing in too much about a new character who I was basing on someone in real life. I ended up writing too much vengeful prose that went off on a useless tangent. It was changing the entire scene of my romantic comedy novel, into some kind of depressing drama! Today I realised I don’t need revenge in the form of fiction. So I just let that character go. Literally. I deleted the character and now my MS is back on track! It’s the same as in real life, if you don’t let hateful things go, it will eat away at you.  I know they say put your enemies into your books and kill them off, which is fine for a thriller, but not this book. Not in this way. So yeah. Tune in next time when I complain about getting stuck on my MS again. Writing is emotional. Ev...

Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia 'Ginie' Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie's extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional person who rejected the submissive role women were expected to play. Ostracised by society for being a foreign divorcée at the time of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Ginie and her second husband ,Stephen Courtauld, leave the confines of post-war Britain to forge a new life in Rhodesia, only to find that being progressive liberals during segregation proves mortally dangerous. Many people had reason to dislike Ginie, but who had reason enough to pull...