Just ordinary people

Over recent years I’ve written seven books in the Radwinter series. I didn’t ever mean to do that, I’d always thought I would never write a sequel to any of my novels, even though the characters continued their lives and adventures in my head! People very kindly asked me to write  the what-happened-next chapters of some of my books, particularly ‘Farholm’, the first story I published.  In fact I did write about the lives of the main characters, Deke, Michael and Sean, but they never made it into print! It was the same thing with ‘Lucky Portbraddon’ – the Portbraddon family continued their lives privately, I never shared what happened to Ismène, Noah, and Alex, and I omitted Antoine’s complete backstory. Know when to stop is a good rule for writers, I think, and with the struggles I’m having with my next Radwinter novel I have the feeling that the lives of Thomas and his family will continue away from the limelight when I eventually finish this wretched episode I’m struggling with now!

I don’t know why I started to re-read one of my novels, a novel which is difficult to place in a genre pigeon-hole.  I know exactly what triggered my impulse to write it; a well-known and well-thought of person inexplicably did something which destroyed his own reputation, shocking not only his family, friends and colleagues but most people who knew of him.  In the case of the real person, he was just a crook and a con, absolutely despicable, but supposing someone did something which caused horrific and unforeseen consequences? Something foolish, something wrong,  something which broke them and damaged them as much as anyone else? I guess all of us do things which we bitterly regret, but we’re just ordinary people, not in the public eye, and sometimes we can make amends, and try and make up for whatever it was.

So I had an idea for this broken character and how they might redeem themselves, and then I had another separate plot line which I had running in my head and it occurred to me I could integrate the two. It was about someone who had suffered a great personal loss, not of reputation, but of a more common tragedy, the loss of someone loved. These two stories ran in my head for many months – in fact it was when my children were young and I had to walk them to school and on the way back from delivering them, my ideas were spinning. What resulted was ‘Loving Judah’. Blurbs are really difficult to write, and I’m not sure what I wrote for this book completely summed up the themes of the novel, but here it is:

The tragic death of Aislin McManus’s adored step-son Judah is a catastrophe; the fact that his father, Peter, blames Aislin almost breaks her heart. Her attempts to mend the breach between her and her husband are failing and when Aislin meets someone else who is blamed for the death of his best friend she resolves to do everything she can to reconcile him with his family, even though she puts herself in danger by doing so.

In case you fancy it, and I’d love it if you do, here is a link – it’s available as a paperback and an e-book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LOVING-JUDAH-LOIS-ELSDEN/dp/B08RLHZHD8/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2E5KR50C51DVR&keywords=lois+elsden&qid=1689028652&sprefix=lois+elsd%2Caps%2C272&sr=8-2