#Blogtour: The Woven Lie by Liz Harris @lizharrisauthor @rararesources #guestpost #newrelease #ThreeSisters #historicalfiction #TheWovenLie

I’m delighted today to be joining the blog tour for the latest book from Liz Harris, The Woven Lie. The third standalone novel in her Three Sisters series, in which each book tells the story of one of the three Hammond girls, this one was independently published on 13th February and is now available both for kindle (just 99p, or free via Kindle Unlimited) and in paperback. My thanks to Rachel at Rachel’s Random Resources for the invitation and support.

Over the years, I’ve read far fewer of Liz’s lovely books than I would have liked to – and for that I can only apologise. I always really enjoy her monthly newsletter (do sign up, it’s one of my favourites – you can do that here) but when I compare her release dates with my reading schedule, I always seem to find them impossible to fit in. And that’s a real shame, because I’ve previously really enjoyed her writing. In fact, it was 2012 when I read and enjoyed my first (and hers, I think!), The Road Back (before the blog, but you’ll find my my Goodreads review here) – a gripping romance set among the mountains of Ladakh, republished in 2022. And it was 2015 when I read and reviewed The Lost Girl, a wonderful story of belonging and not belonging set in 1870s Wyoming (you’ll find my full review here). And then there’s a rather long gap – but I did manage to read one of the books in her Linford Series, The Flame Within, in October 2020, and enjoyed her writing as much as ever (you’ll find my full review of that one here). I always meant to dip into her last series, The Colonials – and now it seems yet another series is drawing to a close without me picking up a single book.

Ah well, I’ll just have to resolve to try harder – and it’s a pleasure today, instead of sharing a review, to welcome Liz as my guest. But let’s take a closer look at the book, which is Violet’s story…

Suffolk, 1948

 

When Violet Hammond sees an advertisement for a manager to run a museum in a village outside Bury St Edmunds, she jumps at the chance of a job that sounds both different and a challenge.

 

For Dr Edward Russell, forced to resign from managing the museum owing to the increasing pressures on him as a doctor, the person to succeed him is obvious – the highly competent Gladys Wilson. After all, Gladys had worked at the museum for years and had run it on her own on many occasions.

 

But when Edward interviews Violet, he’s excited by her enthusiasm and ideas for modernising the museum and her vitality, and he finds himself offering her the position. With a smile on her face and the right words on her lips, Gladys assures Edward that she’ll support Violet as much as she can.

 

But Gladys has no intention of doing so. On the contrary, she wants Violet to be sacked as soon as possible. She has too much to lose if Violet stays.

Intrigued? Over to you Liz…

It’ll be a doddle, I thought, settling down at the computer to start the third book in the Three Sisters series, the first two being The Loose Thread, set in Jersey 1940-1945, and The Silken Knot, set in Dinan 1947. After all, I didn’t have to go through the process of coming up with a heroine for my book – I already had her. My heroine was Violet Hammond, who was already almost-fully formed, you might say, having first briefly appeared in The Loose Thread, which was her sister Rose’s story, and then again in The Silken Knot, which was her sister Iris’s story.

 

But it wasn’t the doddle I’d expected.

 

To explain. A few years ago I wrote a series in which each of three books focused upon a member of the central family, the Linfords. Set in the 1920s and early1930s, The Linford series comprised The Dark Horizon, The Flame Within and The Lengthening Shadow. The head of the Linford family was scheming Joseph Linford.

The Hammonds, the stars of the Three Sisters series, obviously had to be different from the Linfords. Joseph Linford was chairman of the family’s very successful construction company. An intelligent man and a good businessman, who had a daughter living in Germany, he took a keen interest in what was happening on the world stage, especially in the UK and Germany.

 

John Hammond, also the head of a family, owned three successful haberdashery/notions stores in Kentish Town, London, having started out as a market trader. As with Joseph Linford, he was extremely good at what he did and was highly respected, but John wasn’t the sort of person to read the newspapers daily and comment upon world events.

 

However, as with The Linford series, the books in the Three Sisters series were historical novels, and the history of the early 1940s is very interesting, so not only did I want to write a gripping story for each of the books, but I also wanted to give some historical background.

 

The more I got to know John Hammond, the more I realised that the reader would never learn anything historical from him as he would never be as interested in world affairs as Joseph Linford, so I was forced to look at the three daughters, each of whom was to have her own novel. Which of them would be most likely to keep abreast of current affairs, I wondered.

 

The Loose Thread opened with Rose Hammond about to get married and move with her Jersey-born husband to Jersey in 1938, two years before the Germans occupied the island, so Rose was unlikely to be that person.

Me taking a photo of La Corbière Lighthouse, Jersey

I knew also that Iris was far too fun-loving and flighty to be remotely interested in events in the world around her. That left Violet.

 

When the reader meets Violet in The Loose Thread and The Silken Knot, she’s stayed years longer at school than she needed to have done and she’s set on training to be a History teacher. A registered student during WW2, she worked as an assistant teacher in a local school. A teacher with an interest in history, she’d be the one to keep abreast with the news, I realised, and that’s how the reader sees Violet in the first two books in the series.

 

But when I sat down to write The Woven Lie and stood in Violet’s shoes, I realised that Violet was quite like me in some respects. I went straight from school to university where I read Law, and was on the point of going into articles in a solicitor’s office, when I hesitated, suddenly reluctant to follow a path which meant that for the rest of my years I’d effectively be doing more of the same. So I went travelling. I went to California for a year, but stayed there for six!

 

The Violet I had created in the first two novels had been destined to end up a teacher, but at the planning stage of The Woven Lie I suddenly realised that I didn’t want her to be a teacher. Hm. Maybe telling her story wasn’t going to be quite as easy, after all, I thought.

 

Violet hadn’t grown up wanting to go to Hollywood, but like me she’d increasingly felt that she wanted to do something other than what she’d been doing for the past few years. And when she happened upon an advertisement for someone to run a museum in a village in Suffolk, she felt a sudden excitement. That would be different, she thought, and consistent with her interests and background, and she’d promptly applied for the post.

Market Cross, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

It won’t surprise you to know that Violet got the job. It might surprise you to know, however, that behind the pleasant manner of one of the museum staff with whom she’d started to work lay a bitterness and malice towards her that was fuelling a determination to see Violet disgraced and sacked.

 

Having got Violet’s life into the right trajectory, The Woven Lie was terrific fun to write, and I very much hope that readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed devising and writing it.

Thank you Liz – wishing you every success with this one!

About the author

Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company. Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, then in Cheshire and finally in Oxfordshire.

In addition to the twenty-one novels she’s had published since her debut novel The Road Back, Liz has had several short stories in anthologies and magazines. 

Liz lives in Windsor, Berkshire. An active member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading and cryptic crosswords. 

To find out more about Liz, do visit her website.

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