Book Spotlight: Storks in a Blue Sky by Carol Anne Dobson

 

A historical romance played out between the wild coast and moors of North Devon and the mountains and river-crossed plain of Alsace.

The beautiful, red-haired Sarah Durrant is an uneducated servant who takes the place of her mistress when she suddenly dies at Lynmouth as they are travelling across the remote wilderness of 18th century Exmoor. Her origins are a mystery. She only knows she is illegitimate and possesses a gold locket which contains a miniature of a woman who resembles her.

North Devon at first proves a sanctuary from the violence of her past but then the French aristocrat, Jean Luc de Delacroix, a soldier and a scientist, arrives from the New World; the local activities of smuggling and wrecking surface; her life becomes a tangle of love, deception and fear.

Buy Link:

 Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/312lD6

 This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

  

Carol Anne Dobson is a qualified teacher and librarian with a B.A. in English, French and Russian. She has lived in Devon for most of her life, and North Devon provides the setting for much of Storks in a Blue Sky.

Alsace in France came to be a second home when her daughter lived there for six years, and it is this Germanic region of France that also features in the novel.

In 2009, Storks in a Blue Sky won the David St John Thomas Fiction Award.

Author Links:

Website: https://www.carolannedobson.info/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carolanne.dobson.5

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Carol-Anne-Dobson/author/B0034NYKP6

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6851252.Carol_Anne_Dobson

 

 

 

Book Spotlight: The Dartington Bride by Rosemary Griggs. Audiobook narrated by Rosemary Griggs.

 

Follow the tour HERE

1571, and the beautiful, headstrong daughter of a French Count marries the son of the Vice Admiral of the Fleet of the West in Queen Elizabeth’s chapel at Greenwich. It sounds like a marriage made in heaven...

Roberda’s father, the Count of Montgomery, is a prominent Huguenot leader in the French Wars of Religion. When her formidable mother follows him into battle, she takes all her children with her.

After a traumatic childhood in war-torn France, Roberda arrives in England full of hope for her wedding. But her ambitious bridegroom, Gawen, has little interest in taking a wife.

Received with suspicion by the servants at her new home, Dartington Hall in Devon, Roberda works hard to prove herself as mistress of the household and to be a good wife. But there are some who will never accept her as a true daughter of Devon.

After the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Gawen’s father welcomes Roberda’s family to Dartington as refugees. Compassionate Roberda is determined to help other French women left destitute by the wars. But her husband does not approve. Their differences will set them on an extraordinary path...

 

Buy Links:

 Universal Buy Link: https://rosemarygriggs.co.uk/books/2/The%20Dartington%20Bride/

Author and speaker Rosemary Griggs has been researching Devon’s sixteenth-century history for years. She has discovered a cast of fascinating characters and an intriguing network of families whose influence stretched far beyond the West Country and loves telling the stories of the forgotten women of history – the women beyond the royal court; wives, sisters, daughters and mothers who played their part during those tumultuous Tudor years: the Daughters of Devon.

Her novel A Woman of Noble Wit tells the story of Katherine Champernowne, Sir Walter Raleigh’s mother, and features many of the county’s well-loved places.

Rosemary creates and wears sixteenth-century clothing, a passion which complements her love for bringing the past to life through a unique blend of theatre, history and re-enactment. Her appearances and talks for museums and community groups all over the West Country draw on her extensive research into sixteenth-century Devon, Tudor life and Tudor dress, particularly Elizabethan.

Out of costume, Rosemary leads heritage tours of the gardens at Dartington Hall, a fourteenth-century manor house and now a visitor destination and charity supporting learning in arts, ecology and social justice.

Author Links:

Website:https://rosemarygriggs.co.uk/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RAGriggsauthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ladykatherinesfarthingale

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/griggs6176/

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@griggs6176

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ragriggsauthor.bsky.social

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Rosemary-Griggs/author/B09GY6ZSYF

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21850977.Rosemary_Griggs

 

History Trivia - Pope Gregory the Great decrees "God bless you" is the correct response to a sneeze

February 16

116 Emperor Trajan sent laureatae (word of military glory) to the Roman Senate at Rome on account of his victories and being conqueror of Parthia.

600 Pope Gregory the Great decreed the saying "God bless you" is the correct response to a sneeze.

1646 The Battle of Great Torrington, Devon was the last major battle of the first English Civil War.