Hello peeps! Today, I’m pleased to welcome Jenny Harper, women’s fiction author of the Heartlands Series. Jenny lives in Edinburgh and enjoys nature walks and traveling. I think this is represented in her stunning book covers, that exude a sense of freedom and serenity. What do you think? Scroll down and let’s find out all about her, shall we?
Love, loss and family life against the background of a controversial project that fractures the whole community. She builds wind farms, he detests them. Can they ever generate love?
After fifteen happy years of marriage, Kate Courtenay discovers that her charismatic novelist husband is spending more and more of his time with a young fan. She throws herself into her work, a controversial wind farm that’s stirring up tempers in the local community. Sparks fly when she goes head to head against its most outspoken opponent, local gardener Ibsen Brown – a man with a past of his own. But a scheme for a local community garden brings the sparring-partners together, producing the sort of electricity that threatens to short-circuit the whole system.
Fans of Joanna Trollope will love Jenny Harper’s new contemporary women’s fictions series.
She thought she knew her husband, but he’s been keeping a secret … about her. Scottish politician Susie Wallace is under pressure. She risks censure from her Party for her passionate and outspoken views on arts funding. A charity she’s involved with runs into difficulties. And a certain journalist seems to have it in for her. Susie stumbles across some information that rocks her world but not, apparently, her husband’s – Archie has been in on this particular secret for thirty years. Now Susie wonders if she can trust him at all. Soon, unemployed son Jonathan and successful daughter Mannie begin to feel the fallout too, fracturing the family and leaving Susie increasingly isolated. Troubled by mounting pressure from her family, her Party and the Press, Susie goes into hiding. The Party needs her back for a crucial vote, but more importantly, Archie knows he needs to find his wife quickly if they are to rebuild their relationship and reunite the family.
Fans of Joanna Trollope will love Jenny Harper’s new contemporary women’s fiction series.
She’s a professional photographer – but is she ready to expose her heart? Adorable but scatterbrained newspaper photographer Daisy Irvine becomes the key to the survival of The Hailesbank Herald when her boss drops dead right in front of her. And while big egos and petty jealousies hinder the struggle to save the paper, Daisy starts another campaign – to win back her ex, Jack Hedderwick. Ben Gillies, returning after a long absence, sees childhood friend Daisy in a whole new light. He’d like to win her love, but discovers that she’s a whole lot better at taking photographs than making decisions, particularly when she’s blinded by the past. When tragedy strikes Daisy’s family, loyalty drives her home. But it’s time to grow up and Daisy must choose between independence and love…
For readers of Jojo Moyes, Jodi Picoult, David Nicholls, you will love Jenny Harper’s People We Love
Her life is on hold – until an unlikely visitor climbs in through the kitchen window.
A year after her brother’s fatal accident, Lexie’s life seems to have reached a dead end. She is back home in small-town Hailesbank with her shell-shocked parents, treading softly around their fragile emotions. As the family business drifts into decline, Lexie’s passion for painting and for her one-time mentor Patrick have been buried as deep as her unexpressed grief, until the day her lunch is interrupted by a strange visitor in a bobble hat, dressing gown and bedroom slippers, who climbs through the window. Elderly Edith’s batty appearance conceals a secret and starts Lexie on a journey that gives her an inspirational artistic idea and rekindles her appetite for life. With friends in support and ex-lover Cameron seemingly ready to settle down, do love and laughter beckon after all?
Hello Jenny, and welcome to my blog!
Hi Fros, so lovely to be here!
What has inspired you to write your latest book, People We Love?
People We Love is multi-layered – that is, there’s a lot going on! I do like to explore difficult themes, but I hope I do so with a light touch. There’s plenty of laughter in the book – and there’s a mystery, and a love triangle too. The main story is about a family plunged into grief after the death of the heroine’s brother. Lexie Gordon is an artist. When she discovers that ‘shoes tell stories’, she marches herself and her family out of the state of grieving into acceptance and thence onto a path that leads to the future. My parents told me once about an elderly woman with dementia who used to live in their village. She had been put into a care home in a town some twelve miles away, and one day, she walked the whole way back, in her nightie, and climbed in the kitchen window of her old home. I was really intrigued – what was the overwhelming urge that drove her on this marathon journey? Dementia is a difficult disease for families to cope with – my mother suffered from it during the last decade of her life, so unfortunately I witnessed it first hand. In People We Love, Edith Dorothy Lawrence (my elderly character with dementia) brings mystery and laughter and is the catalyst for change.
The setting is my fictional town of Hailesbank, the ‘ancient capital of the Heartland’ (notionally just outside Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital). Anyone who has read my other novels will recognize the setting, but so far the books are non sequential.
I personally find dementia and Alzheimer’s to be fascinating themes in fiction, so I’m quite hooked right now! What other writing have you done? Anything else published?
I wrote quite a few books back in the 1980s, but they were mostly non fiction. They included a number of books about Scotland and a history of childbirth! I also wrote countless feature articles for newspapers and magazines and for a spell I was the freelance decorative arts correspondent for one of the Scottish national papers.
Any hobbies or interests that you enjoy in your spare time?
Oh dear … hobbies. I tend to take things up with passion for a few years then move on – so I’ve done quite a few things! I’m very creative, so there’s been lots in the way of drawing and painting, and I did a number of classes in silversmithing. I still have all the equipment, but I have a trapped nerve in my shoulder which pretty much rules it out these days. Now, apart from writing, I love walking in the hills, dining with friends, and traveling with my husband – pretty much anywhere, but particularly in the UK and Europe, and India, which we’ve visited for the last four years.
Jenny and her husband photographed during their last trip to India
Do you see yourself in any of your characters, or do any of them have traits you wish you had?
That’s an interesting question! I concentrate so hard on my characters when I’m writing about them that I don’t think of them in relation to myself at all. I’m too busy getting under their skin! I suppose all writers draw on their own experiences as well as their imagination, so maybe this applies to character traits too. Let me see … I’m nothing like Daisy Irvine in Maximum Exposure. She’s disorganized and dependent on others. Kate Courtenay in Face the Wind and Fly has a scientific bent and is competitive – I’m afraid science of any kind is a closed universe to me! Susie Wallace, the politician in Loving Susie, is a very glamorous actress and a ‘national living treasure’. All I can say is, ‘If only!’
Maybe I share some characteristics with Lexie Gordon, my artist heroine? Artists tend to see the world a little differently from most people. Lexie is into vintage in a big way and despises the kind of contemporary art that requires some critic or curator to interpret it for you. I certainly share that last trait with her!
What are you working on at the moment? Tell us a little about your current project(s).
People we Love is the fourth in my ‘Heartlands’ series of novels. Up till this point, the characters have not overlapped, but the setting is the same in each novel – an imaginary town (Hailesbank), village (Forgie), and social housing area (Summerhill). I never meant this to happen – I guess I fell in love with the Heartlands!
The novel I have almost finished writing, Mistakes We Make, is the first that takes one of the characters in a previous book and develops it. The character is Molly Keir, Lexie’s best friend, and it takes key elements of her story that we see in People We Love and carries them forward.
I also wrote a novella while I was in India recently. It’s not set there, though, it’s set in France, in a delightful small seaside resort called Arcachon, south of Bordeaux. Again, it takes a character in an earlier book (Nicola Arnott, the headmistress in Face the Wind and Fly), and follows her through one summer. I’m hoping it will be released in July.
Which are your favorite authors, and what do you love about them?
I love books by Jojo Moyes and Elizabeth Buchan, and I enjoy authors such as Rosie Thomas and Penny Vincenzi. What I like is depth, interesting plots and subjects and plausible, well-drawn characters. And really good use of language! But I do read quite widely. I think Robert Harris writes great, page turning books that are really well researched. An Officer and a Spy was a cracker. I like psychological thrillers – Sophie Hannah’s books, for example – and I’ve been known to romp through a Lee Child or ten.
What genres do you read mostly, and what are you reading now?
I mostly like contemporary women’s fiction, which is what I write. I try to support my fellow authors where I can. My writing buddy, Jennifer Young, writes good romantic suspense. I’ve just listened to a book by indie author Jackie Weger, Finding Home, which I’m about to review. It’s a romance, so a little more straightforward than I usually read, but boy, can that lady write! Her characters are extraordinarily vivid. Recently I’ve also enjoyed Lorrie Farrelly’s American Civil War novels. Supporting indie authors can take you on some amazing journeys!
I’ve also just finished listening to Middlemarch, by George Eliot. A marathon listen – more than 30 hours! – but incredibly rewarding. She is such a fine storyteller.
I totally agree about Jackie Weger’s lifelike characters! Finding Home is on my TBR list, so I’m looking forward to your review (Note: Jackie Weger is the founder of my writer’s group, eNovel Authors at Work and a truly remarkable writer and person). Tell us Jenny, if you could choose another profession, what would that be?
My career drifted from one thing to another – book editor, magazine editor, journalist, corporate communications manager. I went into employee communications before it became a specialist subject – there were no degrees in it when I started, for example – so I learned on the job. What I loved about it was the mix of business know-how and people skills, and it would have been good to have made it my whole career and got much deeper into it than I did.
If not that, then I’d have loved to have been an artist. I fondly imagine it would have been a whole lot less stressful than either business or writing novels – but maybe I’m wrong!
Thank you very much for your time, Jenny! Really enjoyed our chat!
Thank you for inviting me Fros, it’s been great!
BIO
I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, but I was born in India and grew up in England. I’ve been a non-fiction editor, a journalist and a businesswoman and I’ve written a children’s novel and several books about Scotland. More recently, I turned to fiction, and People We Love is my fourth novel set in the imaginary ‘Heartlands’, just outside Edinburgh. I used to love making silver jewellery until my shoulder refused to oblige, so now any spare time is used walking in the hills, traveling with my husband, or dining with friends!
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Other links:
https://twitter.com/harper_jenny
https://www.facebook.com/authorjennyharper
http://novelpointsofview.blogspot.co.uk/ (blog shared with four other writers)
