Absolutely delighted to have Sunday Times best selling author, Sue Moorcroft, on the blog. Sue is the newly elected president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and is unstintingly generous and supportive of other writers.

Over to you, Sue, and your three books of choice.

Which book would you most like to have written?

The Woman Left Behind by Linda Howard. I love this book. I’ve read it twice and listened to it as an audiobook, too. Jina is attached to a special forces team for her expertise with clandestine drone operations. Levi is head of the team responsible for putting her through the physical conditioning necessary to keep up with the super-fit men. Jina makes friends with almost everyone else on the team but her relationship with Levi is prickly . . . yet fuelled by red-hot attraction.

The attraction wanes on Jina’s side when a mission goes wrong, and Levi has to make the decision to leave her alone in foreign territory. How does he redeem himself from that? Will Jina even consider forgiving him? Linda Howard is a courageous author to take that kind of conflict on, let alone manipulate these disparate, strong characters through it. I can only recommend that you read this book.

Right with you here, Sue. I love Linda Howard’s books!

Now tell us about the book which never fails to inspire you:

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. I watched the film with my dad one Saturday afternoon when I was nine, and then he mentioned that he had the book. It was my first grown-up novel. I just devoured it. It taught me what a sweeping love story should look like, how love can conquer all yet still be doubted. The hero, Joe, is literally crucified for the heroine Jean and for years each believes the other to be dead. Set against a very real background of war in Malaya and then the Australian outback, I still reread this book every few years.

A book that stays with the reader – in so many ways. I rewatched the film recently and it’s still a powerful and moving watch.

Now, share this gorgeous Christmas new release you have coming out:

The Christmas Love Letters will be published on October 26th in paperback, ebook and audio. It’s set in the tiny village of Nelson’s Bar up on a Norfolk headland, the setting for an earlier book, A Summer to Remember. I’ve long been fascinated by a story my dad used to tell me about a family member whose husband went missing in WWII. Just as the seven-yearmark arrived, after which she could request that he be presumed dead so she could remarry – up popped the husband, having been living with another woman in Italy. In those days, the wife came out of these situations badly, as her choices were often to resume married life with her husband or leave and take her chances in a society weighted against women making it alone. I don’t know how my relative’s husband stood with the authorities, but everything was in his name, and he resumed a tight hold on the purse strings.

Then, at a writers’ summer school last year, a lady passed to me a bundle of love letters sentto a member of her family. They were fascinating, not least because the man who wrote the letters served in the Ministry of Defence like my dad, in the same regiment, and was having a love affair with a female civilian co-worker. He was married, she was not. The letters spanned nearly thirty years and captured my imagination. I so wanted to be able to go to Amazon and download a final instalment that would tell me what happened in the end! But all I could do was piece together some of what I didn’t know to conjure up a backstory that weaves in and out of Maddy’s present story (with name changes, of course). Maddy’s great-aunt Ruthie, for whom Maddy is carer, becomes the recipient of the love-letters, which brings into Maddy’s life Raff – the adopted son Ruthie’s erstwhile lover, Nigel.

Raff becomes the first man Maddy’s has had real feelings for since her husband Adey vanished from a clifftop one snowy night, but the secrets of the past spill out, making Maddy sure that love, for her, is out of reach. Though I put her in the limbo of not knowing what had happened to Adey, I decided to redress the scales for my long-ago relative. In the modernworld, I was able to make Maddy a fighter, unafraid to confront the situation head on as Adey’s best mate and parents only load more trouble on her shoulders.

The Christmas Love Letters will be available from 26^th October 2023 in paperback, ebook and audio.

What a beautiful cover! Here’s a little info about our guest author and the linky things:

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times bestselling author, and her books have been #1 on Kindle UK and Top 100 on Kindle US, Canada and Italy. She writes two books a year for publishing giant HarperCollins and has won the Goldsboro Books Contemporary Novel of the Year, Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary. She’s president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and past vice-chair.

Her novels, short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared around the world.

Amazon page: Sue Moorcroft

Website: :www.suemoorcroft.com

Facebook author page SueMoorcroftAuthor

Twitter: @SueMoorcroft

Instagram: @SueMoorcroftAuthor

Linked in: Sue Moorcroft

Link Tree: linktr.ee/SueMoorcroft

Huge thanks for coming on, Sue!