The Paradise Guest House - Ellen Sussman - Blog Tour - Giveaway

The blog tour for The Paradise Guest House by Ellen Sussman is visiting The Little Reader Library today!

I read and enjoyed Ellen's previous novel, French Lessons - you can read my review here.

Giveaway - 5 copies to be won!

The Paradise Guest House is the new novel by author Ellen Sussman - find out more about the storyline and the author below - and to celebrate publication I have 5 copies of this book to giveaway courtesy of the publisher Canvas Books.

To enter, please leave a comment below. Within the comment, I'd love to know where is most like paradise to you? A far flung destination, or just being at home?

For an extra entry, follow @linshealy on twitter and leave your twitter @ name in the comments below.

For another extra entry, follow this blog by Google Friend Connect by clicking on the 'Join this Site' button in the right-hand column of this blog.

Please include in your comment a way of contacting you if you are not a follower here/on twitter/another blogger/a friend/ someone I can find by clicking on your name.

Giveaway closes Tuesday 2nd April 2013. 5 winners will be chosen at random and contacted straight away, and will need to reply within 48 hours, or new winner(s) will be chosen. UK based entrants only for this one please as specified by the publisher.

Good luck!

The Paradise Guest House is published by Canvas Books, an imprint of Constable & Robinson

About the novel:

It starts as a trip to paradise. Sent on assignment to Bali, Jamie, an American adventure guide, imagines spending weeks exploring the island’s lush jungles and pristine white sand beaches. Yet three days after her arrival, she is caught in Bali’s infamous nightclub bombings, which irreparably change her life and leave her with many unanswered questions.

One year later, haunted by memories, Jamie returns to Bali seeking a sense of closure. Most of all, she hopes to find Gabe, the man who saved her from the attacks. She hasn’t been able to forget his kindness—or the spark between them as he helped her heal. Checking into a cozy guest house for her stay, Jamie meets the kindly owner, who is coping with a painful past of his own, and a young boy who improbably becomes crucial to her search. Jamie has never shied away from a challenge, but a second chance with Gabe presents her with the biggest dilemma of all: whether she’s ready to open her heart.

About the author:

Ellen Sussman is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, French Lessons, published by Ballantine in 2011. Her first novel,On a Night Like This, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. It has been translated into six languages. Her newest novel, The Paradise Guest House, will be published in March, 2013. She is also the editor of two anthologies, Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia Of Sex and Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, which was a New York Times Editors Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller. She has published numerous essays in anthologies, including The Other Woman, and a dozen of her short stories have appeared in literary and commercial magazines. Ellen was named a San Francisco Library Laureate in 2004 and 2009. She has been awarded fellowships from The Napoule Art Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ledig House, Ucross, Ragdale Foundation, Writers at Work, Wesleyan Writers Conference and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has taught at Pepperdine, UCLA and Rutgers University. She now teaches through Stanford Continuing Studies and in private classes out of her home. She has two daughters and lives with her husband in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ellen was born in Trenton, NJ and has lived in Boston, Philly, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Paris and Northern California. She has worked lots of jobs including tennis instructor, restaurant manager, and college teacher but through all the transmutations of her life she has been writing, since the age of six, stubbornly, persistently, with great cockiness and wild insecurity, through praise and piles of rejection letters. She has given up her writing career many times, but only for a day or two, and her family has now learned to ignore her new career choices. She is a writer, an almost daily writer, a writer who actually loves to write. 

You can visit the author's website here

Do visit the other tour hosts listed on the image below for guest posts and some great reviews of this book!

French Lessons by Ellen Sussman - Author Q&A - Blog Tour

I am delighted to welcome author Ellen Sussman to my blog today, as her novel French Lessons is published by Canvas.

Thank you very much for taking part in a Q&A for my blog, Ellen!

Q. How did you continue to write when you were working in other jobs – was this a big challenge, and does writing feel like something you have to do, so that you do it no matter what?

Yes -- I can't imagine NOT writing! I get cranky and ornery when I don't write. I always knew how important writing was to me, so I set up my "day jobs" in such a way that I could make room for writing. When I worked as a manager in a restaurant I wrote by day and worked at night. When I taught on the university level, I taught by day and wrote at night. Now, finally, I have more freedom to write and I write every morning from 9 until noon. I feel very lucky to have shaped my life in this way.

 Q. Is the setting for your novel French Lessons, Paris, a place very close to your own heart, and if so, why? What is it about Paris that makes it such a romantic location for so many people?

I lived in Paris for five years and that experience transformed me.

Paris captured my heart. I return often -- I need to walk the streets and absorb the city in order to feed my soul. And yes, it's a remarkably romantic city. I'm always amazed by the astounding beauty of the place, the gorgeous people, and all those lovers kissing on street corners!

 Q. Do you speak French? Do you think it is the most romantic spoken language?

I do speak French, though I learned rather poorly -- from the playgrounds with my children, from the markets, from daily life. My grammar is terrible and my vocabulary is rudimentary but I get by.

Yes, it's the most romantic spoken language -- but not when I speak it! I love to listen in on conversations at a cafe. Then I can really appreciate the beauty of the language.

 Q. It felt to me that Josie, Riley and Jeremy, the three people taking French lessons, all gain a new clarity on their individual situations after the time spent with their respective tutors. Do you think that sometimes spending time with a relative stranger can allow us a new and helpful perspective on our own complicated lives?

Yes! I also think that travel to a foreign country often shakes us up and helps us see ourselves in a brand new way.

 Q. My favourite character in French Lessons is Josie, whose love life is complicated due to an affair. Was it a challenge to make readers sympathetic to her situation?

Yes, that was my greatest challenge. I wanted the reader to love Josie despite the fact that she's having an affair with a married man. So I tried to make her a well-rounded complicated person -- and a good girl who normally wouldn't do such a thing. Love often surprises us -- and I wanted to reader to understand that Josie, too, was surprised by her behaviour.

 Q. I’ve read that you’ve had many short stories published. Is this a format that you particularly enjoy writing?

I used to love the short story format and I still love reading stories-- but I've lost my heart to the novel. Now I want big, sloppy stories. I want to dive into a novel and live there for a long time.

 Q. What is your ideal or perfect environment for writing? Is there such a place for you?

Yes, my studio in my own house! I have a small room with a view of my garden -- it's cosy and peaceful and my dogs sleep at my feet.

 Q. Are you able to discuss what you are working on now in terms of your writing?

I just finished a new novel, The Paradise Guest House. It's about a young woman who is caught in the terrorist bombings in Bali in 2002 and returns to the island a year later to find the man who saved her.

French Lessons is published by Canvas, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, on 5th July 2012.


Visit the other blogs on the French Lessons blog tour.


You can read my review of French Lessons here.

French Lessons - Ellen Sussman

 

‘The only thing that lasts is love, even when it’s gone.’

Three Americans are taking French language tuition from a language school in the city of romance, Paris, and the novel focuses on the events that happen during the course of the same one day as each of them strolls around the city speaking French with their own individual French tutor. In the short opening section of the book, we are briefly introduced to the tutors, Nico, Philippe and Chantal, and we discover a little about the history between the three of them. Then the novel consists of three separate short stories told as the day in Paris unwinds, first for Nico and his new student Josie who has suffered a loss and is on a trip alone that was meant to be for two, then Philippe and Riley, the wife and mother who is in Paris due to her husbands’ job, and finally Chantal and Jeremy, who has spent the week with her whilst his film-star wife shoots a movie, and this is his last day of tuition. The novel concludes with a final short section about the tutors as they meet again at the end of the day.

More character driven than plot driven, the three students of French all have their flaws and they all have different relationship issues, doubts, or problems, and it’s interesting to dip into each of their lives briefly and discover these conflicts. The novel explores different aspects of love, passion and sex, (at one point explicitly), and conveys the confusion and feeling of being lost and looking for direction in life and love.

The ultimate outcome of this day in Paris for all of them seems to be a new clarity and understanding of their situations, gained through the discussions and time spent with these strangers, their tutors. In fact this finding a moment of clarity and decisiveness is true for at least one of the tutors too. 

This is a relatively quick read, it’s fun and a bit of an escape, it tells of love, passion and desire, and it’s enjoyable to hear some famous Parisian sights name-dropped as the pairs move around the city. My favourite story was the first one, about Josie and Nico. I would be interested to see what the author does next.

You can visit the author’s website to find out more. Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to review this book prior to release. 

French Lessons is currently available for £1 on Kindle http://www.amazon.co.uk/French-Lessons-ebook/dp/B005KRUI6E/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM