I connected with Sandy Barker on Twitter and thought her first cover was beautiful. Now I've caught a glimpse of the author's second one and it's even prettier. (You all know I love purple!)
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BLURB

Note to self: don’t sleep with your flatmate after a curry and three bottles of wine… especially if he’s secretly in love with you and wants you to meet his mum.
Cat Parsons is on the run. She doesn’t do relationships. After ten years of singlehood even the hint of the ‘L’ word is enough to get Cat packing her bags and booking herself onto a two-week holiday.
A European bus tour feels like a stroke of genius to dodge awkward conversations at home. But little does Cat realise that the first stop will be Paris, the city of love itself. 
Joined by new friends, Cat has got two weeks, eight countries and a hell of a lot of wine ahead of her. As they discover hidden treasures and the camaraderie of life on the road, will Cat find a new way of looking at love? 
Discover the beauty of Europe’s most romantic cities in this uplifting and laugh-out-loud novel for fans of Samantha Parks, Alex Brown and Mandy Baggot


PRE-ORDER LINK

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07ZG8C6L3

Blurb
 
Simran, the swashbuckling, no-nonsense new ASP of the Mohanbari District is baffled when a nine-year-old is found dead in a busy market lane. Determined to crack her first heinous crime, she doesn’t leave any stone unturned. While trying to figure out the case her path crosses with Major Imran. Sparks fly, but she is determined to hate him. As the matter gets more complicated, Simran begins to trust Imran.
 
Running through the nooks and alleys of dingy Mohanbari and the mysterious forest nearby, Simran must solve the mystery before the murderer strikes again.
 
Excerpt
 
Simran mulled over her third cup of lal chai in the SHOs chamber. It was a typical police office. Portraits of Gandhi ji and Baba Saheb lurked in opposite corners, on the wall with the honour board, behind the wooden chair. A big whiteboard with details about court cases for the week and important investigations graced the south wall. The north wall was reserved for DKBasu's Guidelines on Arrest. The west wall in front of the chair was a glass partition from where the entrance and the duty officer's room were visible.
 
Deeply craving a cigarette, Simran involuntarily put her pen in her mouth as placebo. Investigation in a murder case, that too of a child, is urgent and should take precedence over everything. A police officer's life, however, is not that simple. Her small red notebook was filled with all that she had to do and an important page in that was dog eared and labelled "Murder: 9 years old". Her meticulous note-making skills while helping her in complying to all the orders passed by the seniors, were also a bane, because she never forgot anything.  Another page which was folded into half bore the name of Major Imran surrounded by multiple circles doodled in anger. A small devil caricature also graced the page.
 
Two months since her joining as Assistant Superintendent of Police, Simran had run into Major Imran on two occasions. Imran had tried hard to impress her in the first meeting, at the evening gathering at the Mess. Dressed in his best formals, Imran had paid attention to Simran all evening and cracked stupid jokes to make her laugh. All Simran could think about was how short he was. She had been kind to him, but there was no attraction. None whatsoever. Imran followed it up with a message next morning.
 
"Morning Ma'am! Shall we catch up on coffee in the evening?- Imran"
Aghast at his forwardness, she replied a curt no.
 "Morning…not possible...I am busy-Simran"
"L Imran"
Simran wanted to make a sighing smiley but held back. She was distracted the whole day and cursed Imran for making her uncomfortable.
 
The second meeting was more eventful. They met at a high-profile intelligence meeting, where Imran completely ignored her. A curt nod in acknowledgment of her existence was all she got from the Major, who looked dapper that morning in his Olive Greens. He was not that short after all. Simran's ego had been bruised by Imran's neglect.

Buy here
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Esha Pandey, is an author and a police officer. She made her debut as an author with her book Kiss of Life and Other Stories, a collection of short stories. Esha currently lives in New Delhi. She is an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the 2010 batch. 
Esha has a Masters in International Relations and Masters of Philosophy in American Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Before becoming a civil servant, she dabbled with the idea of being a journalist and worked with Times of India as a copyeditor. She has won a United Nations FPA Award for Excellence for the “Best Short Story”. 
Esha has kept her passion for writing alive through her tough assignments in policing because writing is music for her soul. Her TDH hero is her partner for life, her husband Rajiv, who supports her in all her endeavors. When she is not doing either, policing or writing, she is busy dealing with her two bundles of naughtiness, her sons.  She can be reached at:
twitter.com/PandeyEsha
https://www.facebook.com/EshaPandeyAuthor/

I had the pleasure of beta-reading this enchanting novella and it left me with a smile. Let's celebrate its release!
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​Genre: Women’s Fiction
Length: 75 pages (novella)
Format: Kindle edition

Blurb

Koel is almost 40 years old and too old to be married — according to Indian society. She's a successful lawyer and a bookworm and quite happy living like a nun until she meets Ranbir Ray. Significantly older than her, Ranbir is hot and sweet and full of pleasant surprises. Can Ranbir teach Koel about life, love and happiness in this heartwarming, fun romance?

Excerpt
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That ended our privacy as we found Reema and Aditi waiting impatiently. They had a table for four next to the bar. Ranbir greeted them politely, waiting for me to slide into the sofa before he sat on it too. We were like the perfect couple. So fast. So well dressed. Familiar with each other and getting more familiar at speed.
We ordered drinks and sushi. Ranbir stole glances and smiles at me, wrapping one arm around my waist until the drinks came. Aditi shamelessly measured his every movement. Reema asked him about his business. I was ignored.
Devouring my sushi, I listened to Ranbir describe his struggles setting up business in a political culture like Kolkata and how hard it had been at first. Reema was in awe. 
Ranbir asked about Reema’s work. He said he was aware of the competition in her field and knew of some of her campaigns. That won her over. Aditi was quiet until she interrupted with a silly question.
“So Ranbir, do you think my friend and you have a future together?”
I was livid. This age gap thing was getting out of hand. I asked her to apologise. However, Ranbir wasn’t annoyed. Or he was not showing it. Instead, he told me an apology wasn’t necessary.
“Aditi is concerned about her friend. It’s a good thing,” he acknowledged.
Ranbir really was a kind man. Glaring at my friend, I waited for his answer.
Clearing his throat, he confirmed that yes, we did have a future together. 
“You see, Aditi, at my age, you don’t spend too much time thinking about what you want -- you just go after it. What I mean to say is that, I have fallen hard for your friend and I intend to keep her by my side for a long time.”
How beautiful. Tears hit my eyes. Happy tears from the heart. I saw Reema and Aditi control their tears too. Ranbir hadn’t used the word ‘love’ but I knew what he meant. I felt the same way about him from that day at the bookstore and coffee shop.
Aditi took a swipe at her eyes and asked him what a long time meant at our age.
Taking my hand in his, he declared, “It means for as long as your friend wants to be with me.”
The three of them all looked at me. I said thank you. Everyone burst out laughing. Aditi behaved well for the rest of the meal. Afterwards, Ranbir dropped her home before he dropped me. She said sorry. Dismissing it with a wave of his hand, he handed her a chocolate bar. He joked, “Now don’t say thank you, Uncle, please.”
We couldn’t stop howling. He was so funny!
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Buy your copy of Past Marriageable Age here:
https://www.amazon.in/Past-Marriageable-Age-feel-good-romance-ebook/dp/B07XHNQMRY/ 
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​Sudesna (Sue) Ghosh is an author based in Kolkata, India. She is a graduate of University of Rochester and an ex-journalist. When Sue isn’t reading or writing, she is busy doing her best to keep her rescue cats happy.
You can find her on Twitter @sudesna_ghosh and on Instagram @sudesna_meow

Title: A Night at Achanakmar (Jungle Series Book2)
 
Author: Paromita Goswami
 
Genre: Spooky,  Horror,  Supernatural
 
Blurb:
 
Maya and her family set out for a weekend trip to Amarkantak. However, due to foggy weather and some unexpected delays later, they end up lost in the jungle. With dusk fast approaching and no way to find help in a no-network zone, their car breaks down. Will they survive or will something untoward happen to them in the mysterious jungle of Achanakmar?
Join the family in this road-trip of a lifetime that will leave you puzzled forever.

Jungle Series – Get ready to be assaulted!

Grab Your Copy @ getbook.at/aNightatAchanakmar
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​Paromita Goswami is a writer and storyteller by passion and a rebel by choice. She says the world is full of stories and as a writer she loves to pen them down. Her work is not genre specific. From literary fiction to children book to paranormal thriller and women fiction, Paromita Goswami‘s books offer the variety of life to her readers. Besides writing, she is also the founder of a reading club that enhances book reading habit in children. She lives in central India with her family.

Other books by the author

Follow the author 
Facebook  |  Goodreads | Website | Amazon page
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The fabulous Belinda Missen and I discovered on Twitter that we have quite some writing-related things in common. For example, we both love heroines with red hair, as well as international romance. I wrote a guest post on her blog about the challenges and fun of exotic settings. You can read it here. Today, Belinda shares why sometimes it makes sense to focus on a story in your hometown instead.
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I know that, recently, we’ve spoken a lot about international romance and how much we both love it. It seems to be a pattern with me that, if I’m not writing stories set in my local town and surrounds, then I’ve got Australian girls packing up and heading overseas to meet the love of their life. Two of my books, An Impossible Thing Called Love and One Week ‘til Christmas (coming very soon) feature exactly that. And, really, that’s not such a bad deal, is it?

There’s something special about international romance. From the first tingling of adventure as you slip your passport over the airport check-in counter, to the screech of aircraft tires as you race to a halt on your receiving runway, and how can we forget the first flutter of the heart when you find yourself face-to-face with someone thought long gone, or someone completely news. There’s just something exciting about exploring new locales, and the feelings that go along with that – let alone with the added excitement of romance on top of it.

Still, what if you’re writing about a love in a town that’s old and familiar like a favourite pair of shoes? What if it’s a love that’s not quite gone, but buried very deep under boxes of old memories and layers of hurt and neglect? How exactly do you make that happen? Well, it’s exactly what I thought I’d try with A Recipe for Disaster.

For the first half of 2017, I’d been in a bit of a writing slump. I’d self-published four books in two years, and things were beginning to wear a bit thin. It had been a massive learning curve, full of bumps and bruises and unrealised potential, and I had to decide what I was going to do in the future.

HQDigital kind of made that decision for me when they ran a Twitter ‘competition’ for authors interested in pitching their novels. With nothing left to lose, and with great prodding from a friend, I pitched three novels and provided a sample of what became A Recipe for Disaster.
From conception to release, the book took about twelve months, cover to cover. One of the things I mulled over was: where am I going to set this book?

I could have picked London, but some of the themes wouldn’t have worked. With everywhere in Europe just a short flight away, it would have changed the book significantly. I thought about creating my own fictional town along the Great Ocean Road. It wasn’t until I went to a local bookshop that I made a decision: I’d set the book in my town.

It was part laziness and part hearing another author talk about setting their books in Queensliff. Dorothy Jackson explained that she didn’t often come across Geelong and surrounds in literature, and she was right. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Geelong in a book, except for perhaps The Biographer’s Lover. And I know I certainly hadn’t seen Inverleigh in a book.
So, off I went.

One of the biggest challenges for me was getting the town just right. It’s easy enough to walk around here everyday and take in the big picture, but what I needed was the minutiae. I needed to be able to draw Inverleigh in such a way that people across the other side of the world would be able to picture her in decent enough detail.

People had to feel the rush of a log truck on the narrow bridge as they come into town, or the see the yellowing lights in the old bluestone pub or smell the fresh chips cooking in the milk bar. We have a small suspension bridge that’s a little wobbly and a steep ascent into the new estate. If you’re not fit, it’ll take you by surprise (it still gets me sometimes).

Also, I think a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with their hometowns. I’m not exception to that rule. There are things I love: a reasonably affordable mortgage, space for Shane’s shed, and being in a small town. Conversely, some of the things I don’t love are: being in a small town (politics et al), being so far from the middle of town, the cost of fuel.

If I was going to write a book though, I had to get past the negatives and shine some love on Inverleigh and Geelong. And, honestly, it wasn’t that hard.

All I had to do was think back to the first times I saw both locations. As a teenager, my friend and I would come to Geelong often. We’d climb into her car, grab some snacks, and make our way around the bay as if it were some weekend excursion we might not come back from.

I remember feeling like such a tourist as we drove around the big roundabout at the top of Mercer Street that’s since been replaced by traffic lights. We looked around in awe at this city that was so much like Melbourne, but also so far removed from it and, yet, we were so close to the suburb we grew up in just thirty kilometres up the road.

And, so, that’s where a lot of my descriptors for Geelong come from; the love of the red brick buildings that now house shopping centres, the big grassed spaces near the waterfront, and the lights of the city at night. Some new favourites made it into the book, too, just because I love wandering around our laneways and finding new places to eat.
Okay, so onto Inverleigh before I keep you all here ALL day (and I’m aware it’s starting to look like that).

There’s a lot to love around here. I took long walks to reacquaint myself with the suburb and its surrounds. I can do a reasonable lap of our town in two hours. It’s a ten-kilometre loop, and I can cover a lot of the different faces of Inverleigh in that time.

As I start off for my walk, I’ll pass the old miner’s cottage that served as inspiration for Lucy and Oliver’s first home. It’s tight and cosy and, if I used my imagination, I could picture it as warm and welcoming, a chain of smoke billowing from a stoked fire. Combine that with their shared love of cooking, and you’ve got a cosy home indeed.

Soon, I pass a paddock of cows and llamas and cross the suspension bridge. If you get it at the right time of day, light dapples through the trees above and tinkles from the small creek that runs underneath.

There’s a scene in A Recipe for Disaster that has Lucy and Oliver crossing the bridge and climbing the steep hill to a party in the newer estates. While the bridge doesn’t bother me, the hill certainly does. It takes a good bit of practice before I can take that hill in one fell swoop.

Compared to the older part of town with lots of weatherboard homes and 1980s brick veneer marvels, the new estate on the hill is fall of large sprawling houses, spruce trees, and some fancy architecture – some of which served as inspiration for the house and party Lucy and Oliver attend.

Of course, a long lap of town isn’t complete without a trip to the pub. It’s one of the first places mentioned in A Recipe for Disaster, but certainly not one we can get. Recently refurbished, you can get great meals and cold drinks here. It is bluestone and beautiful and, when recent rains threatened flooding, it was the first place sandbagged.

I think that last, but certainly not least, the centrepiece of the novel: the café. A lot of people have asked if I drew inspiration from our local café, Red Door. The answer is yes and no. I adore the building, and I can see exactly how Lucy’s and Oliver’s restaurant dreams would fit into it. It’s in the exact spot I pictured their café being – just in the slip lane off the Hamilton Hwy/High Street, and a short walk from the miner’s hut they lived in.

I could picture Oliver mopping floors, a slightly different floorplan, and Patrick carting a circular saw around, pencil behind his ear and getting his Han Solo attitude on. Most of all, I could picture it as a nice homage to that homely thing I love to do – baking . . . but I’ll save the baking chat for later.
 
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Photo of Inverleigh Pub: me
Photo of A Recipe for Disaster: me
Photo of Red Door Café from: https://tetkelly.wordpress.com/2013/09/14/a-knock-on-red-door-cafe/
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​Get the book here: mybook.to/TheLostPrincessBook
Blurb:
HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO TO PROTECT THE ONE YOU LOVE?
Ishaani, the newly crowned nightingale of the Indian music industry has it all: a dream career, a loving family and loyal friends. Yet, the man she has loved all her life will not warm up to her.
Rajeev, a hotshot movie director, has feelings for Ishaani. But she is his sister's best friend and has been like another sibling to him. Yet, what can he do if he feels compelled to make her his own?
Then, Ishaani's life changes overnight. She is no longer a lowly commoner but a princess.
She has to make some tough decisions to protect the man she loves.
Her choices lead them both down a path filled with shocking revelations and devastating consequences.
Will true love prevail?
Or will the many twists of fate tear them apart?
 
Excerpt:
Talking to your best friend can be excellent therapy. But it can be a headache if you’re in love with your best friend’s brother. Ishaani was realizing it the hard way.
"I saw the screenshot you sent. I can’t believe that idiot replied with a ‘thank you’ to your WhatsApp-essay! Why are you wasting your time on that slob? I’m ashamed to call him my brother…"
Ishaani moved her mobile phone away from her ears as Rashi’s voice began to grow shriller and louder by the minute.
"Girl... don't shout. I can hear you alright. I didn’t write an essay, okay? And he might be busy." Ishaani rolled her eyes and cursed herself mentally. In her eagerness to get over her frustration, how did she forget that Rashi loved to troll her brother?
"It qualifies as an essay. It might not get an A if you submitted to Mrs Ellen. But it would definitely win a prize for the longest and cutest WhatsApp message till date."
Ishaani chuckled. After putting the phone on speaker, she placed it on her bed. Picking up a scrunchy from her dresser-drawer, she rolled up her long hair into a top bun. Their high school English teacher Mrs Ellen would have called it purple prose. But a girl had to say what she had to say. Who texted perfect literary pieces to crushes? Long winding flowery sentences with a lot of smilies and ellipses were her style. Before writing to him, she had watched Rajeev’s ZBC television interview twice. And she could be eloquent when she wanted. No wonder Rashi had called it an essay.
"You know your brother's word quota per day. I’m happy he replied this time. Usually, I have to be content with the blue tick." Her silly heart raced when blue ticks appeared on the WhatsApp-messages she sent him. How pathetic!
Ishaani lived by only one rule. She welcomed anything that put her in the vicinity of her long-time crush, Rajeev Ratnam. The elusive movie director who owned her heart. It didn’t bother her that he either ignored her or treated her like a mere acquaintance when they met in public. And when she happened to meet him at his home, he treated her like he treated Rashi. Like a kid who needed guidance at every point in her life. Yet she always rallied her spirits by focusing on what was important. She loved him. Nothing else mattered.
"Keep munching the crumbs he throws at you and he would never treat you to a proper meal."
"No worries. I will cook him a lavish dinner instead. One day soon," Ishaani said, sounding more confident than she actually felt.
"Don't waste your culinary expertise on him. Cook Mughlai biriyani this Sunday. I’m coming."
"Done. What will I get in exchange?"
"What do you want?"
"Full details about his shooting schedule." That way, she could accidentally bump into him without appearing too clingy.
"Say whaat? Not interested in the list of the handsome actors he roped in?
"Nope." Why the heck would she need a list of handsome men when she had lost her heart to ‘the most handsome one’ among the lot.
“Aren’t you interested in the list of the actresses who might throw themselves at him?"
“Not at all.”
"You know what? You’re a tragedy waiting to happen."
Ishaani snorted and bid her friend goodbye before disconnecting the call.