BLOG TOUR
Coming Home to Holly Close Farm by Julie Houston
About the author
Julie Houston is the author of THE ONE SAVING GRACE, GOODNESS, GRACE AND ME and LOOKING FOR LUCY, a Kindle top 100 general bestseller and a Kindle #1 bestseller. She is married, with two teenage children and a mad cockerpoo and, like her heroine, lives in a West Yorkshire village. She is also a teacher and a magistrate.
Follow Julie:
Twitter: @juliehouston2
Facebook: @JulieHoustonauthor
About the book
Charlie Maddison loves being an architect in London, but when she finds out her boyfriend, Dominic, is actually married, she runs back to the beautiful countryside of Westenbury and her parents.
Charlie’s sister Daisy, a landscape gardener, is also back home in desperate need of company and some fun. Their great-grandmother, Madge – now in her early nineties - reveals she has a house, Holly Close Farm, mysteriously abandoned over sixty years ago, and persuades the girls to project manage its renovation.
As work gets underway, the sisters start uncovering their family’s history, and the dark secrets that are hidden at the Farm.
A heart-breaking tale of wartime romance, jealousy and betrayal slowly emerges, but with a moral at its end: true love can withstand any obstacle, and, before long, Charlie dares to believe in love again too…
EXTRACT
‘I bet all the farmers round here don’t think it’s a waste when he’s out with them in the middle of the night pulling foals and calves out of their labouring mothers.’ Dad
was a vet, very much in the manner of All Creatures Great and Small, and a pretty good one if the huge number of bottles of whisky and wine that came our way each
Christmas from grateful farmers was anything to go by.
Vivienne nodded sadly. ‘Yes, I’m sure your father is a jolly good vet – look at him now with that dog of his – but he would have made a brilliant actor had he been allowed to follow in my footsteps rather than his father’s. He could have been a northern George Clooney with that chest hair and those eyebrows.’ She looked me up and down. ‘And you still haven’t any inclination…?’
‘None whatsoever,’ I said firmly, shaking my head so she was in no doubt that I might ever abandon my career and start treading the boards. ‘I absolutely love what I’m doing in London. What I was doing.’
‘And this, this lothario of yours? Surely, darling, you must have had a tiny smidgen of an idea that he was married?’ Vivienne raised an eyebrow.
Had I? Part of me had perhaps wondered if he had another woman somewhere when he was always off, particularly at weekends, but I was so in love with him that I
suppose I’d just buried my head and didn’t question him or the situation.
‘Vivienne, I promise you, I had absolutely no idea he was married. I don’t do married men.’
‘But, if you worked for him as well, surely the other people in the office would have known? Surely one has some inkling whether the boss is married or not?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m obviously one thick woman.’ I felt the tears start once more and swallowed them down. ‘Dominic said to keep it quiet at the office that we were
an item. That the others wouldn’t like it that the new girl was living with the boss. So, I did.’
Vivienne tutted. ‘Oh, dearie, dearie me. And you fell for that one?’
‘Vivienne, stop it, leave her alone.’ Mum came into the kitchen and filled the kettle. ‘Charlie appears to have been had over good and proper. I can’t see it would
have gone on for much longer, had his wife not got in there first.’
‘You didn’t suspect anything, did you, Mum? When you met him?’ I pleaded, not wanting to be the only one who’d been taken in.
Mum shook her head and I smiled gratefully at her. ‘No, Dad and I both thought he was charming. We had absolutely no reason to think he was married with – how many kids is it, Charlie?’ When I couldn’t reply, Mum went on, ‘If you want acting ability, Vivienne, there’s your man.’
I put my head on the breakfast table. ‘What am I going to do now?’ I wailed into the crumbs left behind from Dad’s toast and marmalade. They tasted sweet and
buttery on my cheeks and lips as my tongue sought them out. ‘My life is over at the age of twenty-eight. I don’t have a job, a home or a man.’
Vivienne took my hand, pulling me up from the breakfast table and, aping Ethel Merman, began to sing lines from Annie Get Your Gun. Daisy, trailing dirt and wet in
from the garden, where she’d obviously been doing something gardenerish, joined in singing right on cue with Dad and Vivienne while Malvolio, used to such bursting
forth of song, slunk despondently towards his basket, tail between his legs, as the three of them went for it. I looked at the dog, at Mum, in a world of her own clearing the breakfast table, and at Vivienne, Dad and Daisy united in their love of drama and musicals, and wished I had a tail and basket of my own.
I knew I was home.
Buy links:
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Kobo: http://bit.ly/2SunhcY
iBooks: https://apple.co/2rmy9OL
Google Play: http://bit.ly/2Ul2evq
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