My debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars, was published on 16 March 2020, a day that marked a blogtour that was to end the day before my husband and I were to leave our daughter and her husband in Sydney. We had been staying with them since Boxing Day, had tripped to Melbourne and the Southern Highlands to see friends, had seen raging bushfires, flash floods and soon it was to go “home”. The news came like a long piece of elastic, stretching and recoiling on contingency plans and dashed hopes – closed borders, cancelled flights, visa applications, re-bookings, and all the while bloggers were reacting to my words in a string of my yesterdays – I was, after all, ten hours ahead of them and my UK publisher Eye & Lightning Books.
I had organized meetups with writing mates in Melbourne (Paddy O´Reilly) and Sydney (Selina Samuels, Andy Kissane and Catherine McNamara, now back in Italy where I hope she is safe) before our plans changed. I had caught up with friends from my school and uni days, and was ready to go back to my life in Vienna – we did not want to overstay our welcome.
Trip Fiction published my piece on Vienna just as the city went into lockdown, and I’m grateful for the publication, which gives hope for “after corona”. And then the views began coming in on the Q/As, blogposts I had contributed – one on language, the other on publishing as an older writer – an intensive interview with Rachel Fenton, extracts, and reviews. Some reviews are already on GoodReads, and others like this one here on the tour.
I’m grateful to Rachel´s Random Resources for organizing the blog tour and to all the bloggers who participated and helped make it such a success.
But most of all, I would like to thank the good people at Eye & Lightning Books for believing in my work and getting it out there as one of their new Lightning Bolt eBooks.
People all over the world preordered All the Beautiful Liars, some even gifting copies of the book to others. I am grateful for this as an author, but more importantly, support for my book will help this young innovative publisher keep following its star and publishing works it believes in that appeal to a wide range of readers, and may even get All the Beautiful Liars into print.
As we need to isolate ourselves physically more and more, reading stories can be a solace, and supporting those who get stories to us in ways that may even survive a broadband hiccup is a way we as readers can show solidarity.
Please stay home, and know, that in our minds we can always move onwards!
