Resultado do passatempo "Star Gazing" Linda Gillard

O blogue e a autora Linda Gillard agradecem os 85 participantes do passatempo"Star Gazing".

A vencedora do passatempo é

Isabel Marques Costa

Parabéns e boa leitura ;)

Contest - Star Gazing

This blog in partnership with the author, Linda Gillard, are giving away a signed copy of Star Gazing. To participate in this contest, the following questions on the form below must be answered correctly.

Star Gazing is actually Linda Gillard's third novel and it was voted "Favourite Romantic novel 1960-2010" by readers of Woman Weekly magazine. The novel was also shortlisted in 2009 for the Romantic Novel of the Year and the UK's first environmental book award, the Robin Jenkins Literary Award.

Synopsis:

Star Gazing is set in Edinburgh and one of its main characters is Marianne Fraser, who lives with her sister, Louisa. Marianne has been blind since birth and was widowed in her twenties. Now in her forties, Marianne meets a man named Keir, someone who seems to share her passion for music. One main aspect of this novel that makes it so unique is that it is told through the point of view of a woman who is blind. The language in this novel, with its similes and metaphors, is so rich that there is not much else to do but become immersed in its plot and characters. Keir takes Marianne to the Island of Skye to show her the island, specifically the stars in the winter night sky. Marianne's tour of Skye is an adventure that leaves this novel's readers breathless and wanting more.

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Contest Rules:

-The contest begins today on the 14th day of May, 2011 and will end at 11:59pm on the 22nd day of May, 2011

-The winner of the contest will be randomly selected;

-The winner will be contacted by e-mail

CONTEST CLOSED

Good luck to all the participants!

House of Silence by Linda Gillard

House of Silence was overlooked by traditional publishing houses, but we can thank the book gods that House of Silence was at least released to us as a kindle ebook. I hope readers find their way to this ebook because it really is a gem. I really enjoyed Gillard's Emotional Geology and A Lifetime Burning and House of Silence certainly did not disappoint, from the novel's very first page to its very last. The novel tells us the story of Gwen Rowland who spends Christmas with her boyfriend Alfie and his family. But from the moment Gwen and Alfie arrive at his family's home, Creake Hall, things just don't appear as they seem. This story turns out to be one of family ties, mystery and charming characters and it will leave you guessing until the very end. These characters all have their own story and as you learn more about their personalities, their stories and their pasts, you end up falling more in love with them. I would definitely recomment House of Silence and you can find it on amazon.com as an ebook for an incredible price.

Estante de Escritores - Linda Gillard

 As estantes que apresentamos hoje são da escritora Linda Gillard , a escritora é muito acessível, tem mantido contacto connosco através do facebook e nota-se que se preocupa e tenta esclarecer os seus leitores.

Obrigado Linda,  pela sua disponibilidade e simpatia :)

Escritores na Primeira Pessoa - Linda Gillard

A little bit about Linda Gillard: .

Linda Gillard graduated from Bristol University and then trained as an actress at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. While she was employed at the National Theatre, she also worked as a freelance journalist. She became a primary teacher twelve years later and then moved to the Isle of Skye, where she lived in a house overlooking the Cuillin mountain range (which was featured in her first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. Linda's first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, was short-listed for the 2006 Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING, was published by Transita in 2006. In 2010, Linda's third novel, STAR GAZING, was short-listed for Romantic Novel of the Year and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award (the UK's first environmental book award). STAR GAZING was also voted Favourite Romantic Novel 1960-2010 by Woman's Weekly readers. Although EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY and A LIFETIME BURNING are now technically out of print, copies are available from the author herself. Also, the following link to The Book Depository ships worldwide post-free: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9781905175253/A-Lifetime-Burning

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Interview: .

Diana L: Did you always want to write? When and why did you begin writing?

. Linda Gillard: I became a novelist by accident. I’d been an actress, journalist and teacher before I took up writing fiction and I’d had a mental breakdown as a result of stress and overwork as a teacher. When I was convalescing I did a lot of reading. I was disappointed that I couldn’t find any commercial fiction that reflected my life and interests. This was 1999, I was 47 and I wasn’t interested in chick lit which was very big at the time. I couldn’t find any heroines who were over 40! Older women were always somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never featured as romantic heroines. So I started writing the sort of book I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinking woman’s love story that dealt with real issues, had believable characters, a gorgeous hero, but no easy answers. As a matter of principle I made my heroine 47. This was suicide in terms of finding a publisher, but I didn’t care - I was just writing to amuse myself. I got the writing bug pretty badly and joined a writer’s e-group. We were all writing novels and we read each other’s books chapter by chapter. The group was encouraging and said I should try to get my novel published. I didn’t think I stood a chance because my heroine was 47 and also suffered from bipolar affective disorder (manic depression), but I found an agent who loved the book and eventually we found a publisher. That book became my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, published in 2005. .
 
DL: How do you get your ideas for the plot and setting of your books? Do you plan your books before you start writing them or do you just start to write?

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 LG: I don’t plan much. I don’t like knowing what happens! I need to know enough about the story to get started, that’s all. (I actually think your unconscious mind – if you let it – will write a better book than your conscious mind.) For me the genesis of a book tends to be a combination of visual things, ideas that gnaw away at me, until I find I'm thinking about them a lot and making links. I start with ideas, but those ideas always seem to come with people attached and often snatches of dialogue. This is no doubt a throwback to my days as an actress. I’m familiar with storytelling through dialogue (which might be why two of my novels have been optioned for films.) An example of this “vision” process in EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was the “woman alone in a light, white room” opening. I could see that room and sense the atmosphere. I could see the woman, but I didn’t know who she was or who she was writing to. When I’m plotting, I just keep saying “What if…?”, trying to make things as complicated as possible. (You can always simplify later.) But I don’t think I’m all that interested in plot. My plots always arise out of character. What goes on inside the mind of a character interests me more than what goes on outside it. Fortunately, I don’t need a plot to start writing, I just need a situation, some interesting characters and a lot of unanswered questions. .

DL: Where did you get your inspiration for A LIFETIME BURNING?

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LG:

There were two key ideas that I brought together for A LIFETIME BURNING. One came from a radio interview in which a middle-aged, middle-class female vagrant talked about how she’d wound up living on the streets. Her story was desperately sad, but also darkly comic and slightly sinister. The other idea was a writing challenge I set myself. I wanted to write a scene where a character walked into a room and saw or experienced something that turned his world upside down and made him re-evaluate his entire life, but from the reader’s point of view, I wanted nothing to happen and no-one to know. Nothing would happen on the surface. Life would just carry on as normal, whilst seismic shocks reverberated beneath the character's surface. I thought of something eventually and it became a pivotal scene in A LIFETIME BURNING, but when you read it, "nothing happens". Only much later do you find out what was going on. That kind of plotting fascinates me. Nothing happens, but at the same time everything happens. I love the paradox. .

 

 DL: When I finished reading A LIFETIME BURNING, I had to go back and re-read the prologue because it is written in a way that you don’t really know what’s going on in the beginning. In EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, everyone seemed to have a secret, and after the secrets are finally exposed to the reader, the reader is tempted to go back and re-read. Did you write your books with this intention?

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 LG:

Yes! I’m so glad this is how you felt. I write all my books to be read twice and I think they’re very different on the second read. (Two books for the price of one!) I know some readers go back and re-read to see if I’ve “cheated”, but I never do. It was quite hard keeping tabs on everything in EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY because the characters knew far more than they were letting on and everyone had something to hide. So a lot of the dialogue had to be written to work on two levels, meaning one thing to the reader, but something else to the characters, who knew a lot more. .

 

DL: Who is your favourite author and do you find that your writing style is similar to his/hers?

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LG:

My favourite is a Scottish author, the late Dorothy Dunnett who wrote historical fiction. (Start with GAME OF KINGS)http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780679777434/The-Game-of-Kings if you want to try her.) My style is nothing like Dunnett’s, but I think she’s been an influence on my writing, in terms of characterization and plotting. I learned from her that it’s character not plot that carries a good book. But Dunnett also wrote a lot of memorable, highly dramatic scenes. Seeing how brilliantly she handled them made me want to be ambitious in my writing. She also developed my taste for complex, flawed heroes and heroines. I love and admire her so much, I’ve posted an appreciation of her on my website: http://www.lindagillard.co.uk/further-reading.php .

 

DL: Which one of your three books is your favourite and why?

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LG:

A LIFETIME BURNING. Most readers prefer one of the others, which are easier reads, but I don’t expect ever to write a better novel than ALB, which was technically and thematically ambitious. Some people have hated the book, many have been shocked by it, but many more have been moved and found it a real page-turner. I get lots of complaints from readers about being kept up until the small hours because they want to finish one of my books. Now when I sign a book at an author event, I warn people not to start reading late at night! .

 

DL: I enjoyed all the female protagonists in your books, because they seem like real women with real problems, facing real obstacles. In STAR GAZING, the female protagonist is a 45 year old woman who is blind, widowed and lonely. In EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY, the female protagonist is 47 and she suffers from bi-polar affective disorder. In A LIFETIME BURNING you span many generations of women from the same family and the female protagonist is very complex. How do you get ideas for your characters? Are they made up or based on real people?

 LG:

I was glad to hear you liked the women in my books. They are flawed, even a bit irritating at times. I don’t try to make my heroines immediately likeable as they usually are in rom-coms and chick lit. I find some heroines in commercial fiction pretty bland. I think the first duty of a fictional protagonist is to be fascinating, not likeable. Jane Eyre wasn’t exactly Miss Happy-go-lucky, was she? ;-) All my characters are made up. Some of them owe a lot to me. (Not the heroines particularly. I put a lot of myself into my heroes.) Some characters might owe their physical form to someone I met or just someone I’ve seen in a film. (I work a lot with photographs when developing characters.) But I’ve never based a fictional character on anyone real. It’s so much more exciting to create something from scratch and see what happens. Garth the Goth in STAR GAZING (http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780749938970/Star-Gazing) was like that. He was just supposed to be a minor character, but he took over and became one of my favourites. Garth turned out to be much more interesting than I could ever have planned and his origin was the Goth teenagers I used to see hanging around the shopping precinct in Inverness. I had the idea for a blind heroine in STAR GAZING because I wanted to write about a (possibly) imaginary hero. I wondered if I could I write a book where the reader wasn’t sure if the hero actually existed. It occurred to me that if you’re blind, the existence of other people is confirmed by voice, touch and the corroboration of others. But you only touch people you know well and a voice could be imagined. And what if no one else sees the man you hear?… So I decided I would make my heroine blind and because I never do things the easy way, I thought I might as well write in the first person, from my blind heroine’s “point of view”. It was a fascinating experiment. I suppose it must have worked because STAR GAZING was short-listed for 2 awards and won another. I thought omitting visual references could be boring for the reader, but in fact the book was enriched by having so much expressed in terms of other senses. It was certainly a challenge having to create a hero by describing how he sounded, felt and smelt! .

 

DL: Do you communicate with your readers? If so, what are some of the things they say about your books?

 LG:

Yes, I get a lot of emails from readers and I always reply. Some readers have become friends. I’ve guested on blogs and discussion forums where my books have been Book of the Month. That’s terrific fun. You can get into a real dialogue with readers and they always manage to show you aspects of your book that you haven’t seen yourself. I also have an author page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Linda-Gillard/148890999324?v=wall&ref=mf) and I’ve met a lot of readers at author events – always a happy experience. My readers are passionate about my books and they love my characters - especially the heroes! EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY features a textile artist and a poet and some readers said, as a result of reading the book, they wanted to take up or resume a creative hobby. At a more serious level, many readers have said they learned a lot from EG about mental illness and the problems carers experience. Some people have written to me to say, “I didn’t realise that what was wrong with my mother/sister/friend was manic depression until I read your book.” EG seems to have been inspiring in different ways. I had an email from a teenager who’d been self-harming. She said thanks to reading EG, she’d stopped cutting and had started writing poetry. Fan mail doesn’t get any better than that. Hearing from readers has been the best thing about being published. To be able to discuss your characters as if they’re real people is a huge treat! On a bad day, writing fiction seems such a silly way to spend your time. (My son refers to my writing as “playing with my imaginary friends”!) But when readers share your obsession with you, it all makes a crazy kind of sense.

 

.DL: I would like to express my sincerest gratitude for taking the time to share your thoughts and your works with us here on Destante. You have enriched us with such food for thought! As one of your readers who finished your books in all-nighter sessions, I found each one of your books to be unique and fascinating in their own individual ways. Your books captured me with their engaging characters, breathtakingly magnificent settings and unique writing style. Although, one thing that your books had in common was that they all enticed me to read them again! Thank you Linda.

Emotional Geology by Linda Gillard

Emotional Geology is set in the island of North Uist, off the coast of Scotland. The novel is about Rose, a middle-aged textile artist who also suffers from bi-polar disorder. She finds Calum in Uist, who is both a teacher and poet. These two people are both fragile in their own ways, and they are both struggling with their pasts. This novel deals with topics of madness, creativity, and suicide to name a few. Rose interprets some of Calum’s poems into quilts, and when I read the book a second time I found it very interesting that we never actually get to read one of Calum’s poems, and yet I felt like I had read them...just like I felt that I had touched Rose’s quilts. Rose speaks to us sometimes in this novel through poetry and through letters she writes to her daughter. The book almost felt like one of Rose’s quilts- each memory, letter and poem made pieces of different textures, that all came together in the end to form a quilt, and this quilt formed a scrapbook of Rose’s struggle to survive (both mentally and physically). Another reason why I liked this book so much was because the characters had secrets that were not revealed to the reader until later on in the novel. The characters in this novel knew a lot more than they were letting on and it was fun to go back and re-read the novel after the secrets were revealed. The second time I read the novel was a completely different experience than the first time. I read this book in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down. I was lost in Rose’s mind, in her quilts, in Calum’s poetry...and I was lost in their past...making it nearly impossible to put down this book. Emotional Geology was a very moving and fascinating read and I would definitely recommend it.

Star Gazing by Linda Gillard

Marianne Fraser is a woman in her mid-40's who is blind and lives with her sister, Louisa in Edinburgh, Scotland. When Marianne was in her late 20's, her husband died. As if life couldn't get any worse, she later miscarried with his baby. When she least expects it, Marianne meets a man named Keir Harvey, and their relationship unfolds as an extraordinary adventure that leaves you tangled in its plot and characters, making it very hard to put down the book. I actually read the book in one day, all the while laughing out loud at certain moments and holding back tears in others.

Keir doesn't see Marianne as a blind woman, he sees her as a woman; he does not feel sorry for her because she is blind, he admires her for her strength of character and her personality.

This is not a conventional romantic novel. Its characters feel like real people, with real imperfections, real desires, with real reactions, facing real obstacles.

Star Gazing is also an environmental novel that helps remind us not to take nature for granted. This novel is a call to action. It makes the reader reflect on their own carbon footprint they are leaving behind in the world.

The bond of sisterhood is also an important theme portrayed in this novel - an unbreakable bond that supersedes life's toughest hardships.

What I loved most about this novel was how Marianne shows us what its like to feel a landscape. This book takes you out of your comfort zone, and before you know it, you are experiencing the book through other senses. Rather than imagining that colour the narrator is describing to you, you are imagining what something smells like or listening to music and animal sounds.

I would definitely recommend this book, it is a great read.

Sonhar as Estrelas - Linda Gillard

A minha opinião:

Marianne Fraser é cega desde nascença, mulher sozinha aos quarenta anos e com um passado muito sofrido pela perda do marido e do filho. Keir, é o homem por quem se apaixona, ele tem algo especial, algo que ela admira nele. Ele trata-a como se ela fosse uma igual, ou seja, como se não fosse cega, ao contrário de tantas outras pessoas. No início da relação, a sua irmã (louisa) fica apreensiva e até tenta protegê-la de Keir, mas cedo entende que os sentimentos são verdadeiros. Para além da história desta narrativa que está escrita de forma simples e muito apelativa, prendendo desta forma o leitor, o que achei também bastante importante e que Linda Gillard conseguiu transmitir, foi passar a quem lê as dificuldades, as frustrações, as alegrias na conquista de pequenas coisas e por tudo aquilo que passa uma pessoa invisual. Factos estes, que muitas vezes passam despercebidos às pessoas ditas normais. É um romance que nos faz reflectir.

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Sinopse:

Marianne Fraser, cega à nascença, viúva na casa dos 20 e solitária aos 40, vive num elegante bairro de Edimburgo na companhia da sua irmã Louisa, uma escritora de sucesso. A natureza apaixonada de Marianne encontra consolo e expressão na música, um amor que partilha com Keir, um homem com quem se cruza à porta de sua casa numa noite de Inverno. Embora vários homens tenham surgido na vida de Marianne, Keir não se compadece com a sua situação. É rude mas também estranhamente delicado. Mas pode Marianne confiar nos seus sentimentos por este desconhecido solitário que quer levá-la para a sua casa na ilha de Skye e «mostrar-lhe» as estrelas?

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Os Laços Que Nos Unem - Linda Gillard

Sinopse: Rose Leonard quer esquecer o seu passado.Refugiada numa pequena comunidade numa ilha ao largo da Escócia, dedica-se ao seu trabalho no silêncio e na solidão da sua casa à beira-mar. Porém, ela é assombrada por memórias indesejáveis.A sua filha solitária, Callum, um homem mais novo e frágil, que quer exorcizar os seus demónios, e os seus novos amigos dão-lhe a esperança e amor necessários para viver cada dia. Mas terá Rose, presa à vida e sanidade por um fio, a coragem de dizer sim à vida e esquecer o passado? . A minha opinião: Rose Leonard vive presa aos seus fantasmas, às suas inquietações, àquilo que a magoou profundamente no seu passado e que continua a magoar no presente. É um romance que fala dos nossos medos, das nossas falhas, da nossa capacidade de perdoar. Perdoar não só os outros, mas também a nós próprios. Fugir do passado não compensa, o melhor mesmo será enfrentar tudo aquilo pelo que passou e Rose encontra em Callum um porto seguro. Callum, também ele teve de lidar com o seu passado, mas a sua força de viver ajudará Rose a enfrentar os seus medos, os seus obstáculos. Há neste romance uma outra questão que nos faz reflectir sobre até que ponto há o direito de se limitar a pessoa que se ama para protegê-la dos outros e de si mesma. E até que ponto o protegido tem o direito de negar esta protecção. Um romance interessante que se lê numa tarde de fim de semana e que nos faz reflectir sobre vários aspectos da vida.

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