Wish You Were Here by Victoria Connelly

Alice Archer is a shy and plain single twenty-eight year old woman, who is out shined by her over confident sister Stella. Who treats poor dormouse Alice like a doormat, always running Alice down.  When the chance comes for Alice who has never done anything adventures in her whole life to spend a week on the Greek island of Kethos with Stella, she puts it out of her mind how difficult her sister could be with her demanding ways and instead looks forward to the chance to do something different and to spending some time by the sea and in the sun.

While on holiday Alice meets handsome gardener Milo who notices Alice straight away, in fact Alice starts to notice that since she has arrived on the island normally invisible to men Alice seems to have become most desirable to men, turning heads wherever she goes. Alice had always wondered what it felt like to be beautiful and now on this small island it would seem her dream had come true.

Alice and Milo get close, but is it something more than a holiday romance? And once the holiday is over will the spell be broken?

I am a huge fan of Victoria Connelly’s books, they never disappoint and are the sort of books you can just get lost in. Pure escapism. I loved travelling to Greece in the book and reading Alice and Milo’s story, picturing all the scenic and beautiful pictures views and places on the small island of Kethos, creating the perfect setting for this wonderfully warm romance novel.

To buy this book from Amazon UK click here

Escape to Mulberry Cottage by Victoria Connelly

This is author Victoria Connelly’s real life account of making her dream come true and moving to the country. Victoria has had the dream of moving to the country since she was a teenager, but sadly her dream is put on hold, as life leads her to London and she ends up living there for eleven years.

Feeling trapped by life in London and longing to escape with husband Roy and Molly their pet springer spaniel they find their escape in a beautiful old cottage. Mulberry Cottage and Victoria writes of the move and settling into country life, adjusting to the difference between town and country. Exploring her new environment and preparing her cottage and making the dream come true.

A really delightful read and always an inspiration when you read about people who against all odds make things happen and get to live their dreams. I really enjoyed the hen’s stories being included in the book too. As an animal lover Victoria decides to adopt and rescue some ex battery chickens and it been heart-warming to read about this and their adventures. The book also includes some beautiful photographs to accompany the story. 

There are some handy hints at the back of the book on how us townies can bring a touch of the country side to our lives and homes and a nice collection of country reading material that Victoria recommends and I certainly would like to read a few on her list. I enjoyed reading the readers’ Questions & Answers session at the end of the book, it is just so interesting to learn more about authors and their lives and this book is certainly an interesting read that can easily be read in one session.  

A wonderful, warm and pleasant read I really enjoyed reading this book.

To buy this book from Amazon UK click here http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BAUP91Y

To buy this book from Amazon US click here http://amzn.com/B00BAUP91Y

Christmas with Mr Darcy by Victoria Connelly

Dame Pamela Harcourt is an established actress, who is most well known for starring in television adaptations of Jane Austen novels. Dame Pamela now organises and hosts Jane Austen Conferences for Jane Austen fans. She is about to put on her first Jane Austen Christmas conference at Purley Hall. But when it starts to snow will the Austen addicts be able to make it? Then when Dame Pamela’s brother Benedict who is always in a fix or trouble calls to say he is coming too and not long after he arrives a first edition of a Jane Austen book goes missing, will this become more like a whodunit than a Jane Austen experience?

A fabulous cast of characters that are so well written, that they could all easily have their own spin off books that would make great reads too. I can think of nothing better as a reader than to attend a Jane Austen Conference and how magical that would be at Christmas.

To buy this book from Amazon (UK) click here http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009JTNIKC

To buy this book from Amazon (US) click here http://amzn.com/B009JTNIKC

I would like to welcome, a very special guest on my blog, author Victoria Connelly

I’ve always wanted to be a writer.  I started my first novel when I was fourteen and used to pass it under the table for my friends to read during Maths lessons.  It once got confiscated and the teacher, Mr Rowan, started to read it which was highly embarrassing but, luckily, it didn’t put me off writing.

When I was trying to get published, I kept hearing this phrase ‘USP’.  Your book has got to have a USP agents would tell me – a ‘Unique Selling Point’.  I’d written a romantic comedy which got me a lot of attention but it didn’t have that ‘USP’.


It was shortly after this that I came up with the idea for Flights of Angels - a story about a young widow called Claudie who has her own group of tiny guardian angels to take care of her.  Angels, I thought - that was my USP!  I was so excited about this because I truly believed I’d found the secret of success and, when I sent that novel out into the world, I waited with baited breath.

And then the rejections came and I felt so silly for having dared to be too different.  In fact, the rejections got to me so much that I stopped writing the novel until a dear friend read the beginning and told me that I had to finish it because it was the best thing she’d ever read.

So, I finished the book and I’m so glad I did because Flights of Angels was my first novel to get published although, bizarrely, not in the UK.  The publisher was in Germany.  I believe it’s rather unusual to have your first novel accepted by a foreign country but Germany did an amazing job and it was even turned into a film and my husband and I got to fly out to Berlin and were invited to be extras – an experience I’ll never ever forget.  And I wish you could see those little guardian angels on film – they were adorable!

Then came two more magical romantic comedies.  Unmasking Elena Montella about a woman who is given a magical Venetian mask which helps her choose which of her three (yes – three!) fiancés is the right one for her.  And Three Graces about a young woman who marries a duke and goes to live in his ancestral home only to find it’s haunted by a rather opinionated eighteenth-century ghost.

I had so much fun writing these books but they were never published in the UK even though they’d done so well in Germany.  So I’ve decided to make them available on Kindle where you can buy them individually or as a trilogy called It’s Magic.

I love rom coms with a touch of magic and have been influenced by films like Blithe Spirit, The Ghost and Mrs Muir and Truly Madly Deeply and I hope my own magical rom coms can give readers some of the happiness that these films have given me.


To buy Flights of Angels click here

To buy It's Magic click here

http://www.victoriaconnelly.com
Twitter - @VictoriaDarcy

The Runaway Actress by Victoria Connelly

Connie Gordon is a beautiful, successful Hollywood actress, who on the outside seems to have it all. But inside Connie is deeply unhappy, she has been in the acting business since she was six years old and she has become tired of the lifestyle that goes with it, the constant diets and the cheating boyfriends. It also feels like she is living out her mother’s dream of being an actress.

Connie longs to escape; to a place she can just lose herself, to where she will have some peace and quiet. So when she receives an invite from her fan club in Scotland. She decides to go and visit, to what she thinks is a small sleepy Scottish village called Lochnabrae.

When she arrives in Lochnabrae and meets the locals including her biggest fan Maggie and a reclusive writer called Alistair, Connie finds herself thrown into village life and before she knows it she is involved with the village amateur dramatic society.

Will the sleepy village of Lochnabrae turn out just to be as dramatic and chaotic as the life she has been living in Hollywood?

If you are looking for the perfect book to take to read on your summer holiday then this book is just that. It is a really good fun and entertaining read. This book is just one of those nice care free stories that you can just lose yourself in and is a delight to read. I really enjoyed reading this book. 

Victoria Connelly grew up in Norfolk. After graduating, she worked her way through a number of jobs before becoming a teacher in North Yorkshire. In 2000 she got married in a medieval castle in the Yorkshire Dales and moved to London. After writing articles and short stories, a bidding war between five publishers in Germany resulted in a book deal and the first of three novels published was made into a film.

Her first novel to be published in the UK Molly’s Millions (2009) was a Top Ten e-book bestseller. Victoria has also written a trilogy about Jane Austen addicts. Victoria and her husband recently left London for a cottage in rural Suffolk, where she lives with a Springer spaniel and a brood of rescued battery hens.

To buy from Amazon.co.uk, click here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1847562760

To buy from Amazon.com, click here: http://amzn.com/1847562760

For more information about the author, click here: http://www.victoriaconnelly.com