Monthly Archives: May 2023

Location, Location, Location with Jan Baynham!

Today, I am joined by fellow Choc Lit author Jan Baynham. I love Jan’s novels and the locations her stories take me to, so I am delighted to hear there is another coming soon. In this post, Jan reveals the setting of her forthcoming novel and shares her wonderful research; over to you, Jan…

My novels are all partly set in rural mid-Wales, the area where I was born and brought up, and partly in a contrasting location. Creating a sense of place and an authentic world for my characters to live in is one of the aspects of writing I enjoy. As well as visiting beautiful Radnorshire in my latest novel, readers are transported to the Mediterranean island of Sicily with its stunning scenery, magnificent ecclesiastical buildings, fascinating history and, of course, its wonderful weather. It’s where my character, Carlo, an Italian POW who is interned in a camp in the heart of the Welsh countryside, is from. He’s left behind a secret, and after his death, his daughter travels to Sicily to find out why her father could never return. I’ve tried to capture what it was like for Claudia visiting the island for the first time.

Last summer, my first visit to Sicily proved an excellent way of experiencing what it was like for Claudia. The city of Porto Montebello is fictional but based on the real places I visited, with the presence of Mount Etna in the background. As Claudia walks to find the pensione where she’ll be staying, she’s struck by the city’s straight streets and their tall buildings with shuttered windows and balconies so different from her home village.

The area has stunning architecture and churches everywhere you look. In the novel, Claudia has enrolled on an art history course so I made sure I visited the beautiful duomos in Catania, Taormina and Ortigia where I found examples of the type of paintings she’d be studying.

In the early part of the novel in WW2, Carlo’s mother shelters from the bombing in tunnels under the duomo. A highlight of my research was to visit one such shelter and try to experience how she must have felt night after night. The tour guide, Roberto, was excellent in giving so much information about what life was like down there for the inhabitants of Ortigia.

Another tour I booked in advance was a visit to Casa Cuseni in Taormina. The villa was built at the beginning of the twentieth century by Englishman, Robert Kitson and became an international artistic centre hosting celebrities from the world of literature and painting. This stunning villa is the inspiration when I imagined Casa Cristina in my book. The garden was full of symbolism in its design and the sea views from the villa were amazing.

No visit to Sicily would be complete without a boat trip. After the underground tour of the tunnels, I ended my day with a trip around the island of Ortigia. Our boat man pointed out places of interest, the heart-shaped cave and took us to admire the stalactites, stalagmites and corals in another. This experience inspired how Claudia feels when taken on boat trips.

I hope that being on location in Sicily will have made the setting more real for readers. Visiting the places that Claudia does, eating the same foods and enjoying the hot sunshine as she did all came back to me as I wrote those scenes.

About the book:

With the working title of A Tale of Two Sisters, my fourth novel is due to be published by Choc Lit, an imprint of Joffe Books, in July.

Set in rural mid-Wales and Sicily in different eras, the novel deals with secrets, forbidden love, sibling relationships and forgiveness. There’s an immediate attraction between young widow Sara Lewis, and Carlo Rosso, an Italian POW, even though fraternisation between the POWs and local women is forbidden. At the camp, former artist, Carlo, is tasked with leading a team of prisoners to create a chapel in a disused Nissen hut using scrap and found materials. He busies himself with that intending to forget about Sara. Can he succeed? Prisoners are given more freedom in September 1943 when Italy capitulates and is no longer an enemy of the Allies, but a relationship between Sara and Carlo is still not allowed. After the war, when it’s eventually safe to leave Wales, Carlo stays on as he’s harbouring a secret that means that he cannot return to Sicily. After his death in 1968 and finding letters he’d kept from his mother, Claudia travels to the city where he grew up to find out why. She is shocked by what she finds out but discovers that Carlo has been framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Can she succeed in clearing his name? Who does she get to help her?

This sounds like another great read, Jan. I wish you every success with it and look forward to it landing on my Kindle in July. xx

All of Jan’s novels are available on Amazon. Click here to find out more.

Her Nanny’s Secret is also available at all good bookshops.


About the author:

Fascinated by family secrets and ‘skeletons lurking in cupboards’, Jan Baynham’s dual narrative, dual timeline novels explore how decisions and actions made by family members from one generation impact on the lives of the next.

Setting and a sense of place plays an important part in all of Jan’s stories, and as well as her native mid-Wales, there is always a journey to a contrasting location from the heart of Wales, where my characters are always from.

Originally from mid-Wales, Jan lives in Cardiff with her husband.

Find out more about Jan Baynham and her novels here: Website/Blog | Twitter | Facebook |


Writing and Mental Health with Ella Cook.

Today, I am delighted to welcome Ella Cook to my blog as she talks about the importance of writing for mental health; over to you, Ella …

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say writing is one of the most important things in my life: it’s how I make my living (in the business world), how I met my other half, and how I stay sane.

I was only a teenager in my first year of study when the proverbial rug got yanked from under my feet as I was handed the diagnosis of bipolar. Initially, the treatments and therapy were difficult and confusing. But, as luck would have it, the degree I was studying was Communications, Authoring and Design – so lots of writing was required. And it was that writing which gave me a focus, a place to be, and feel safe amongst all the crazy going on around me.

Writing has brought me through the hardest and worst parts of my life: through stresses, family illnesses, bereavement – and, yes, covid lockdowns. While other people were struggling with the idea of restrictions, I’d disappeared off into a fictional world filled with love and magic and sparkle.

Working in Health & Social Care, where mental health and emotional wellbeing is a specialist interest topic for me, I’m very aware of how useful writing can be from a therapeutic point of view. Research shows that writing can enhance self-awareness and self-understanding, which ultimately decreases depressive symptoms, anxious thoughts and how we experience stress.

Below are a few of the key techniques:

Expressive Writing: Often used in therapeutic settings to encourage people to write about their emotions and stresses and face them in a safe environment. You could think of this as the angry letter you write – to get the feelings out – but maybe never send. Or creating a character to face the scary things in life, so you can ‘try out’ options ahead of time (I do this one a lot!)

Creative Writing: Links very strongly to expressive writing and can give people a way to explore topics that might be too complicated or too overwhelming to put into words – J.K Rowling famously commented that her Dementors were a fictional manifestation of depression (which explains why happy memories in the form of a patronus, or chocolate can beat them).

 Reflective Writing: Regularly used in professional settings to explore self-performance and learning. It’s about asking questions of yourself and seeing how you can learn from experiences. You may well have already done this in supervisions at work or when putting together a CV. It can be a great tool for improving personal and professional relationships.

Getting Started

For a lot of people, there can be a lot of worry about how/where to get started writing, what to put down on that blank page, and whether or not what you write is good or interesting enough. Some people worry about how they can possibly write anything without having built their whole (fictional) world first.

It shouldn’t be that pressured. You can start with a single scene or image. Or one character. Or pick one question. These are called writing prompts. If you go onto any social media platform or search engine and type in Writing Prompts, you’ll get plenty of inspiration. But as it’s mental health week, how about opening a document or beautiful notepad (or, in my house, finding a random bit of paper to scribble on and a not-too-blobby pen) and just spend 5-10 minutes looking at the pretty picture below, and writing down whatever pops into your mind. You might be surprised.

The book I’m currently working on started with the image of a lighthouse. Now it’s heading to 50,000 words and growing!

Thank you so much for the great post, Ella. xx

Ella Cook’s novel Summer’s Christmas is currently available in paperback, ebook, audio and is free on Kindle Unlimited.

Bringing the spirit of Christmas to a summer’s day …

Summer by name and summer by nature – that’s how people describe Evelyn’s happy, outgoing daughter. Even if her favourite time of year is actually Christmas!

But Summer has gone through more than any eight-year-old ever should, and that’s part of the reason Evelyn is leaving everything behind to return to her childhood home in the village of Broclington; just her, Summer and Summer’s best friend – a Shiba Inu dog called Tilly. Unsurprisingly, Evelyn is hesitant to let anyone else in, although local vet Jake MacPearson seems intent on winning her trust.

When Evelyn receives the news that every mother dreads, it’s Jake who comes to the rescue. With the help of the Broclington community, could he be the man to bring festive magic to August, and make all of Evelyn and Summer’s Christmases come at once?


About the Author:

Ella is one of those people who is addicted to the written word. She’s been obsessed with books since before she could walk. She decided to become a writer as soon as she realised that stringing letters together in the right order could actually be a career.

She grew up in the outskirts of London, where fairies lived at the bottom of her Grandma’s garden, so it isn’t surprising that she still looks for magic in everyday life – and often finds it.

When she’s not living in a fantasy world of her own creation, she writes bids and develops programmes for children’s services and lives in rural Warwickshire (where there are probably more fairies). She shares her house with two small parrots, one of whom likes to critique her writing from his favourite spot on her shoulder, and her husband, who is ever-loving and understanding and makes her gallons of tea in magical cups that can keep drinks warm for whole chapters.

Discover more about Ella and her work here: Ella Cook Writes.


Location, Location, Location with Eva Glyn.

Having read and reviewed The Collaborator’s Daughter recently, I am delighted to welcome author, and writing friend, Eva Glyn to my blog as she talks about Dubrovnik, the stunning location of her book. Over to you, Eva …

One of the early reviews for The Collaborator’s Daughter said it was a homage to Dubrovnik and its people, and I thought, ‘job done’. Well, obviously not the book’s only job, but a pretty important one to me.

Writing as Eva Glyn, I am contracted to write books set in Croatia, so location is vitally important. It’s becoming what readers expect when they pick up my book, a virtual trip to that part of the Mediterranean, with its beautiful scenery, fascinating history and warm and welcoming people.

Although I flirted with Dubrovnik in The Olive Grove, The Collaborator’s Daughter is my first book set in the city’s old town, although it will not be the last. For me, there is no finer place to be, with its terracotta roofscape enclosed within medieval walls that rise up and down with the rhythm of the rocks they stand on. Outside, the sea glistens pure azure, and inside, it is so compact it feels like a village.

Of course, in high season particularly, it’s jam-packed with tourists. Not only groups from cruise ships and Game of Thrones fans (it was one of the iconic filming locations) but day-trippers from local resorts and seaside hotels and people staying in the old town itself.

The best advice is to go early or late in the season or early in the day. When I was researching The Collaborator’s Daughter last year, we had to visit in July, but even so, walking the city walls (one of the must-do attractions) at eight in the morning, it was relatively quiet. And I needed to go there because it’s where my main character Fran heads to do some of her thinking as she tries to work out what best to do with her life.

Cat on the city wall.

Another iconic place Fran visits – or rather, is taken by local widower Jadran, is Gradska Kavana for coffee. The terrace is in the centre of some of the major tourist attractions; the Sponza Palace, the Rector’s Palace, Sveti Vlaho (Saint Blaise) church, the bell tower and the famous statue of Orlando. It’s a marvellous place to people-watch and drink a delicious cappuccino. A little pricey for Dubrovnik maybe, but cheaper than most of the UK coffee chains and so much better.

Gradska Kavana terrace.

The Sponza Palace is another location that’s key to The Collaborator’s Daughter. In the 1944 storyline, it is where Fran’s father, Branko, works for the city’s fascist mayor, to use his words in the book, the place the web of evil spins out from. For all that, it is an incredibly beautiful building with a much longer happy history, and inside hides the Memorial Room to the Dubrovnik Defenders, a heart-breaking homage to the men who lost their lives in the Homeland War of the 1990s.

Sponza Palace.

But here I am, beginning to sound like a tourist guide again. I just can’t help it. With somewhere so warm, friendly, and beautiful, I am compelled to keep going back. And to keep writing about it.

Thank you so much for the lovely post and sharing your wonderful pictures, Eva. I greatly enjoyed The Collaborator’s Daughter and wish you every success with it. xx

About the book:

In 1944 in war-torn Dubrovnik, Branko Milisic holds his newborn daughter Safranka and wishes her a better future. But while the Nazis are finally retreating, the arrival of the partisans brings new dangers for Branko, his wife Dragica and their baby…

As an older sister to two half-siblings, Fran has always known she has to fit in. But now, at sixty-five years old and finally free of caring responsibilities, for the first time in her life, Fran is facing questions about who she is and where she comes from.

All Fran knows about her real father is that he was a hero and her mother had to flee Dubrovnik after the war. But when she travels to the city of her birth to uncover the truth, she is devastated to discover her father was executed by the partisans in 1944, accused of being a collaborator. But the past isn’t always what it seems… And neither is the future.

Purchase and discover more here. | See my review here.


About the author:

Eva Glyn writes escapist relationship-driven fiction with a kernel of truth at its heart. She loves to travel and finds inspiration in beautiful places and the stories they hide.

Her last holiday before lockdown was a trip to Croatia, and the country’s haunting histories and gorgeous scenery have proved fertile ground, driven by her friendship with a tour guide she met there. His wartime story provided the inspiration for The Olive Grove, and his help in creating a realistic portrayal of Croatian life has proved invaluable. Her second and third novels set in the country are dual timelines looking back to World War 2, An Island of Secrets and The Collaborator’s Daughter. Eva Glyn is published by One More Chapter, a division of Harper Collins.

Eva lives in Cornwall, although she considers herself Welsh, and has been lucky enough to have been married to the love of her life for more than twenty-five years. She also writes as Jane Cable.

Discover more about Eva Glyn: Website | Facbook | Instagram | Twitter | Newsletter sign up


And, while blogging, I have exciting news to share. All of my romance novels are now available on Kindle Unlimited; enjoy!