Blog Tour Author Post: Someone New by Zoe Miller

Today I am thrilled to be hosting Zoe Miller for her blog tour for her new book Someone New. I love Zoe's books and am very much looking forward to reading this one. Please enjoy the article written by Zoe below, which is about one of the themes featured in her new book, about keeping up a perfect facade. It's a fun read! Thanks to her publishers and to Zoe for inviting me to be part of the blog tour!

You can buy the book now.

SOMEONE NEW: Blog Tour Day 5

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Chloe for being part of the blog tour for Someone New and I’m delighted to be featured today as a guest post on her blog, Chicklit Chloe Blogspot.

Today the guest post looks at the question of keeping up a perfect façade, one of the themes in Someone New.  So many of us maintain a perfect front to put out there to others, sometimes keeping other sides of ourselves away from even our nearest and dearest. We don’t always know the true colours behind the façade people present to the world. It’s a theme I find recurring in a lot of the novels I’ve written - after all anything can be going on behind closed hall doors, or our closed-off selves, or the veneer of an impeccable mask; the potential for human drama and tension as the writer delves beneath the mask or unveils the truth is limitless, for both protagonist and antagonist alike. We don’t know what anyone is going through until, as the saying goes, we’ve walked a mile in their shoes, and that applies to the characters we read and write about as much as ourselves.

In Someone New, Grace Bailey, the thirty-year-old lead character, had been giving her family and friends the impression she was quite happy with her lot and her boyfriend Gavin, and all was well in her world. Likewise her sister Lucia, who has, according to Grace, always accomplished everything perfectly and according to the golden rules.

In some respects it can good for ourselves and our well-being to keep up appearances, to put our best foot forward, to meet the world with a smile. We all need to keep certain boundaries around ourselves, and keep our hearts safe from those who might treat them less than sensitively.  We don’t always need to allow people access all areas of our lives, never mind our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes little white lies can be useful to spare someone’s feelings or safeguard our own.

In Someone New, however, we soon find out that behind the happy impression she had been giving out, Grace had been living the kind of life she felt she ought to be living rather than the kind of life that was true to herself.  She’d been living under the weight of other peoples’ expectations, doing things she felt she should be doing, conforming to other people’s opinions of what makes up a happy, successful life, until she began to feel she was drowning.  In the opening scene, Grace feels she has hit rock bottom. It’s Christmas time, she’s met Gavin, her (now) ex-boyfriend for a drink, and somehow he manages to push all the wrong buttons and make her feel guilty for breaking it off with him, particularly now in the run up to Christmas, which for some, can be the loneliest time of the year instead of the most wonderful. Grace has lived behind a façade for so long that she feels remorseful for breaking free.

Then she meets Danny.  

Writing about Danny, and the way he explodes into Grace’s world and helps her to sweep away the cobwebs of other peoples’ expectations and begin to live a life true to herself was enjoyable and fun. It was more surprising fun however, discovering the effect he had Lucia, when he couldn’t help but shake the silk-covered walls of the life she had constructed around herself.

The problem with putting up a perfect façade is that it can collapse down around us when we least expect it to, and in Someone New that’s exactly what happens…

Thank you Chloe, for having me as a guest on your blog today.

Zoë xx

About Someone New
In her heart, Grace knows the perfect, reliable, good-looking Gavin isn’t right for her. Then she meets Danny. Unpredictable and spontaneous, he turns her world upside down. All of a sudden, Grace is seeing life differently and doing things she never thought she’d do.

But tragedy strikes when Danny dies in a motorbike accident, shattering Grace’s world. As she struggles to come to terms with her loss, she becomes more and more convinced that she’s being followed – sighting a motorbike exactly like Danny’s everywhere she goes. And she starts to wonder if Danny’s death was really an accident.

When she finally voices her suspicions to her family and the police, though, no one seems willing to believe her.

Meanwhile Grace feels ever more under threat as sinister things begin happening to her. What was Danny hiding from her? And what kind of danger is she in now?

About the Author:
Zoë Miller writes contemporary novels laced with suspense and intrigue. She was born on the south side of Dublin, where she still lives with her husband. She has two daughters and a son. As a child, Zoë was always the one with her head stuck in a book and she enjoyed reading so much that it compelled her to write. ‘Someone New’ is Zoë’s eighth book to be published by Hachette Books Ireland, and Zoë fits in her writing between family time and the day job.

Website: www.zoemillerauthor.com

Blog Tour: A Question of Betrayal by Zoe Miller

Today I am delighted to be the stop on Zoe Miller's blog tour for her brand new book A Question of Betrayal. I have a copy of the book sat on my shelf waiting to be devoured, and I just know it's going to be a great read yet again! Zoe was kind enough to write this article for me about the book, and it certainly makes me intrigued to read the story now and find out more! Thanks to Zoe and her publishers for inviting me to be on the blog tour, I hope you enjoy the piece!

Do We Really Know Our Parents?

The old black and white photograph sits on a shelf in my writing room. It shows a young couple sitting in a field, with a rug spread beneath them and a big oak tree framing the background. They have their arms around each other and seem contained in a magical world of their own, oblivious to everything else including the photographer. It is a photograph that was taken of my parents when they were dating. It took me a long time to fully appreciate all the wonderful nuances it conveys as it blended into the furniture in my parent’s home for years, and I took it entirely for granted.

By the very egotistical nature of childhood, when we see ourselves as the centre of the universe, our parents are viewed as the solely the people who are responsible for looking after us, whose job is to nourish and protect us, clothe and feed us. That perspective can change slightly during the teenage years, as they sometimes become the people we rail against for imposing boundaries and curtailing our freedom.  It’s only as we reach adulthood that we begin to realise our parents are complete individuals in their own right, and that they had lives before we came along to disrupt it all!

In A Question of Betrayal, Carrie Cassidy’s father paints a memorable picture of the special dynamic between Carrie and her parents; as a child, when her dad was helping with her maths homework and she was wrestling with Venn diagrams, he took a page of her copy book and drew a large circle, explaining that it represented Carrie’s mother and him, where no part of them existed without the other. Then he drew a smaller circle inside the big circle, explaining that this was Carrie, who was a part of them and always with them.  The three musketeers, her dad often called them. The three amigos, her mother used to say. Years later, when Carrie is told that her mother had an affair with a young musician some time before she was born, it comes as a total shock to her. Even though the dates and places fit, it is impossible for Carrie to imagine her mother as a young woman with feelings and needs, and so consumed with passion that she betrayed her father. But the surprising news finally ejects Carrie out of the rut she was stuck in following her parents’ death, in order to seek out the truth.

The wheel of life comes full circle. I think it’s only when we have children of our own, and we are in the roles of parents and care givers, that we appreciate our parents as fully rounded people in their own right, with rich histories behind them of which we know little or nothing. There is a small framed photograph in my sitting room of my husband and me, which was taken when we were dating; we thought we owned the world right then, the bright young things who partied long and hard and expected to live forever, driven by dreams and passions and the sometimes foolhardy headiness of youth. Maybe it’s a good thing my children’s eyes skim unseeingly over it most of the time – and that to them it’s just an old photo of responsible Mum and Dad!

Zoë Miller writes contemporary fiction laced with intrigue and drama. She is published by Hachette Books Ireland and her latest book, A Question of Betrayal, is now out in paperback. When Zoë’s not escaping into her writing world, she juggles her time between her family and the day job. Find out more at www.zoemillerauthor.com, Facebook/zoemillerauthor, or follow Zoë on Twitter @zoemillerauthor.

A Question of Betrayal: Ever since the deaths of her adored parents, Carrie Cassidy has avoided risk and commitment, fearful of bringing something precious into her life only to lose it again. So now she finds herself working in yet another uninteresting job, and the love of her life, who wanted more than she could give, has left her. Will she ever move on?
Then, a mysterious woman visits Carrie and reveals a secret that forces her to delve into her mother's past. As Carrie learns more about the woman she thought she knew, she finds herself looking at her own life and wondering if she's living it the way her mother would have wanted her to. Meanwhile there is someone watching Carrie who would rather the past stay buried . . .
A Question of Betrayal is available in all good bookshops or online here