It's launch Day for WHERE THE SKY BEGINS - Rhy's Wonderful New WWII Novel!

RHYS BOWEN: Today I am celebrating my new stand-alone novel called WHERE THE SKY BEGINS.

 

This was not my first title. Nor my tenth. It was a compromise between the marketing gurus at Amazon (who I suspect are all twenty-year old male computer geeks) and my editors, agents and me.

 

I wanted to call it THE TEASHOP AT THE EDGE OF ETERNITY.   I still love that title but…

 

I was told it’s too many words. Hard to read on an Amazon thumbnail.  Also teashop is not a word that would attract male readers. Put them off.  So, we tried other directions:

 

We know that these days titles with WOMAN, GIRL, DAUGHTER, WIFE seem to work well.

 

The Woman from London? The Woman from the Rubble? The Soldier’s Wife? The woman who got bombed and moved out into the country and met a pilot? None of them sounded right. And heaven knows we don’t need any more books with daughter, wife, girl in the title, do we?

 

 So it takes place beside an RAF base. Night flight? Flight into danger?  They sounded too male oriented war stories. At the End of the Runway?  That sounded too fashion oriented.

 

 

Enigmatic titles seem to be the thing these days: Where the Crawdad’s Sing, All the Light we Cannot See…. So we played with the setting—the flat, wide expanse of Lincolnshire after the narrowness of London streets. The House on the Marsh. The House at the Edge of… again too many words. Bombed? Buried? Reborn? 

 

And I realize that what strikes my heroine most as she is transported out of London is that she sees the sky for the first time. At home, between narrow streets, there is often smog from coal fires, rarely a clear blue sky, and here the sky seems to go on forever. It’s an important image and the word BEGINS indicates the character having a chance to start a new life. 

 

It’s funny how certain titles come into fashion, almost for no reason. I have a new Lady Georgie book coming out in November called PERIL IN PARIS. And I see that there are so many books called PERIL IN… this year. Should I be flattered that they are all jumping on this bandwagon?  Or is it just coincidence?  There certainly were enough variants on the Twelve Clues of Christmas after that book came out!

What do you think of the title? What sort of titles attract you and make you pick up a book?  

 

WHERE THE SKY BEGINS  London, 1940. Bombs fall and Josie Banks’s world crumbles around her. Her overbearing husband, Stan, is unreachable, called to service. Her home, a ruin of rubble and ash. Josie’s beloved tearoom boss has been killed, and Josie herself is injured, with nothing left and nowhere to go.

Evacuated to the English countryside, Josie ends up at the estate of the aristocratic Miss Harcourt, a reluctant host to the survivors of the Blitz. Awed as she is by the magnificent landscape, Josie sees opportunity. Josie convinces Miss Harcourt to let her open a humble tea shop, seeing it as a chance for everyone to begin again. When Josie meets Mike Johnson, a handsome Canadian pilot stationed at a neighboring bomber base, a growing intimacy brings her an inner peace she’s never felt before. Then Stan returns from the war.

Now a threat looms larger than anyone imagined. And a dangerous secret is about to upend Josie’s life again. Her newfound courage will be put to the test if she is to emerge, like a survivor, triumphant.

Rhys on the Serendipity of Research.

 

RHYS BOWEN:  one of my favorite parts of writing is the research. It's like going down a rabbit hole every time. I'm looking for one thing and suddenly I discover something else you hadn't considered or thought about before and suddenly you have a new aspect of the story! It's always an absolute gift.

I have a new book coming out at the beginning of August. WHERE THE SKY BEGINS.  It’s another WWII book, this time set in England, close to a bomber command base where the young men took off for Germany every night and half of them didn’t return in the morning. That meant they were courting death every day, making the most of even the most simple of pleasures, knowing it might be their last.

So how did I come up with this story? Little did I know that what I was doing as research for one story would the catalyst for another. Well, you can thank my friends Penny and Roger Fountain for that. They are old and dear friends (we were in college together. I shared a flat with Penny when she met Roger. We’ve stayed in touch over the miles, when they moved to Canada and then came back to England. Since then I’ve stayed with them every time I’m over there. Roger converted an old stables into a fabulous house for them in Lincolnshire.

  It’s the flattest part of the country, rather like Holland with fields below sea level separated by dykes and channels of water. The sky is enormous and you can see church spires miles away. Because it is so flat, and it faces the coast of Europe, most of the bomber bases were established there, including the USAF bases when they joined the war.

When I was writing THE TUSCAN CHILD Roger and Penny took me around several of the old air bases that are now preserved as museums. We saw a Blenheim Bomber in flight (which featured in the Tuscan Child). I was able to climb up into a Lancaster bomber. I examined parachutes, flight suits, helmets and letters home, often written by men who did not return. And during those visits I found out that the survival rate for a bomber crew was 50 percent. As a new pilot or radio operator or gunner you were lucky if you made it through six weeks. That really stuck with me—and yet young men kept volunteering, knowing how slim their chances were. One of my characters says He’d rather do something proactive than be a sitting duck on the ground.

So these young men haunted me and I realized that I wanted to write about them. How to tackle the story? I didn’t want to write the traditional brave and foolhardy pilots story from a male point of view. So the story focuses on a woman who is evacuated to the countryside, right next to one of these bases.  Her home has been bombed. She’s been rescued from the rubble with nothing. How do you start again when you don’t even have the basic necessities of life?

Well, if you are Josie you make the best of it.  You survive against all odds and you work at making life a little better for those young men, only to find there may be a spy in their midst.

I get letters about my WWII books asking why the story couldn’t have ended happily. Couldn’t Leo have survived? They ask about the Venice Sketchbook. And little Hanni and the countess?

Well, the simple answer is that there wouldn’t have been much of a story if it had all ended well. There would have been no need for Caroline to find out her aunt’s secret history. But also we have to face the fact that many stories about war do not end happily. There is senseless killing, lives and homes destroyed, survivors who will never be the same again. That is why I continue to write about it, to remind people of the awful consequences of extremism and war.

When you read Josie’s story in three weeks from now, let me know what you think.