by Allie Cresswell
*Silver Medal Winner in the Readers' Favorite Competition, and shortlisted by Wind Dance Films*
Burned-out author Dee needs fresh inspiration. Impetuously, she abandons London and her good-for-nothing boyfriend to go wherever her literary quest takes her. Journey’s end is a remote village on the shores of a wild estuary, overshadowed by a ruined pele tower. She rents Winter Cottage and waits for a story to emerge.
The bleak beauty of the whispering dunes, the jacquard of colour and texture of the marsh and a romantic tree in a secluded glade—The Trysting Tree—all seduce Dee. Nevertheless, the secretive behaviour of a handsome neighbour, lights across the marsh, a spurious squire and a bizarre, moonlit encounter all suggest there is something odd afoot.
Local gossip and crumbling graveyard inscriptions give Dee the opening she needs. She begins to weave hints about the tragic history of a local family, feuding brothers and a fatal fire into a sweeping historical saga. Her characters clamour for a voice as the tale spools effortlessly onto the page—demanding to be told. Dee feels more like its instrument than its instigator.
As she becomes enmeshed in the local community, Dee is startled to find her fiction unnervingly confirmed by fact, her history still resonating in the present-day.
Is she being guided by echoes of the past?
Allie writes quintessentially British historical and contemporary fiction.
Born in Stockport, NW UK, Allie studied English literature at Birmingham and Queen Mary Universities, gaining an MA. She has worked as a pub landlady, a print buyer and a bookkeeper, and run a group of boutique holiday cottages. She taught English to lifelong learners until turning to fulltime writing in 2010. She writes fiction recognisably rooted in northern England's urban, rural and coastal landscapes. The stories are character-driven, often exploring the extra-ordinary things that happen to ordinary people. Women, particularly middle aged and older women, figure strongly in books that span genres from literary to suspense, Gothic, Women's Fiction and romance. Her prose has been described as raw and warty. Also intelligent and lyrical. She is the recipient of multiple Readers' Favourite awards.
What secrets hide beneath the veil? When her mother departs for a tour of the continent, Georgina is sent from the rural backwaters to stay with her cousin, George Talbot, in London. The 1835 season is at its height, but Georgina is determined to attend neither balls nor plays, and to eschew Society. She hides her face beneath an impenetrable veil. Her extraordinary appearance only sets off gossip and speculation as to her identity. Who is the mysterious lady beneath the veil?
by Allie Cresswell
Thirty years before the beginning of 'Emma', Mrs Bates is entirely different from the elderly, silent figure familiar to fans of Jane Austen’s fourth novel. She is comparatively young and beautiful, widowed - but ready to love again. She is the lynch-pin of Highbury society until the appalling Mrs Winwood arrives, very determined to hold sway over that ordered little town.
Miss Bates is as talkative aged twenty-nine as she is in her later iteration, with a ghoulish fancy, seeing disaster in every cloud. When young Mr Woodhouse arrives looking for a plot for his new house, the two strike up a relationship characterised by their shared hypochondria, personal chariness and horror of draughts.
Jane, the other Miss Bates, is just seventeen and eager to leave the parochialism of Highbury behind her until handsome Lieutenant Weston comes home on furlough from the militia and sweeps her - quite literally - off her feet.
Jane Bates has left Highbury to become the companion of the invalid widow, Mrs Sealy, in Brighton. Life in the new, fashionable seaside resort is exciting indeed. A wide circle of interesting acquaintance and a rich tapestry of new experiences make her new life all Jane had hoped for. While Jane’s sister, Hetty, can be a tiresome conversationalist, she proves to be a surprisingly good correspondent, and Jane is kept minutely up-to-date with developments in Highbury, particularly the tragic news from Donwell Abbey.
When the handsome Lieutenant Weston returns to Brighton Jane expects their attachment to pick up where it left off in Highbury the previous Christmas, but the determined Miss Louisa Churchill, newly arrived with her brother and sister-in-law from Enscombe in Yorkshire, seems to have a different plan in mind.
The final instalment of the Highbury trilogy, Dear Jane narrates the history of Jane Fairfax, recounting the events hinted at but never actually described in Jane Austen’s Emma.Orphaned Jane seems likely to be brought up in parochial Highbury until adoption by her papa’s old friend Colonel Campbell opens to her all the excitement and opportunities of London. Frank Weston is also transplanted from Highbury, adopted as heir to the wealthy Churchills and taken to their drear and inhospitable Yorkshire estate. Readers of Emma will be familiar with the conclusion of Jane and Frank’s story, but Dear Jane pulls back the veil which Jane Austen drew over their early lives, their meeting in Weymouth and the agony of their secret engagement.
by Allie Cresswell
by Allie Cresswell
by Allie Cresswell
by Allie Cresswell
A novel of family dynamics, secrets and strained loyalties. What DOES it mean to be 'family'?
The McKay family gathers for a week-long holiday at a rambling old house to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Robert and Mary. In recent years, only funerals and sudden, severe illnesses have been able to draw them together and as they gather in the splendid rooms of Hunting Manor, their differences are soon uncomfortably apparent. For all their history, their traditions, the connective strands of DNA, they are relative strangers. There are truths unspoken, but the question is: how much truth can a family really stand?
The family holiday mushrooms, drawing in sundry relatives both estranged and deranged. The machinations of an appalling, uninvited aunt threaten the holiday – and the family – with irreparable damage.
This book will make you question your own family situation. What does it really mean to be 'family'?
by Allie Cresswell
Who knows what secrets are trapped, like caged tigers, behind our neighbours' doors?
When Molly and Stan move into a new housing development, Molly becomes a one-woman social committee, throwing herself into a frantic round of communal do-gooding and pot-luck suppers. She is blinded to what goes on behind those respectable facades by her desire to make the neighbourhood, and the neighbours, into all she has dreamed, all she needs them to be.
Twenty years later, Molly looks back on the ruin of the Combe Close years; at the waste and destruction wrought by the escaping tigers: adultery, betrayal, tragedy, desertion, death.
But now Molly has her own guilty secret, her own pet tiger, and it is all she can do to keep it in its cage.
