The 3 Books of Carol Hedges

Today I welcome Carol Hedges to the blog to talk about her 3 books.

Carol is the successful UK writer of 17 books for Teenagers/Young Adults and Adults. Her writing has received much critical acclaim, and her novel Jigsaw was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal.

Her ebook Jigsaw Pieces, which deals unflinchingly with many of the problems that beset today’s teens, is available on Amazon as is her Dystopic Fantasy The Last Virus

Carol is also the writer of ‘The Victorian Detectives’ ~ a series of novels set in 1860s London and featuring Detective Inspector Leo Stride and his side-kick Detective Sergeant Jack Cully.

1. What’s the first book you remember reading?

Orlando the Marmalade Cat by Katherine Hale. I was four, possibly five at the time, and my mother used to dump me in the local library while she went shopping. This was in the then parents could do that sort of thing without someone calling social services (I also used to walk down the road to nursery ON MY OWN, AGE TWO). Anyway, in those barbaric pre-health and safety days, library books all had boring plain covers.

So, there I was, sitting by the picture books section and I plucked this one off the shelf. And I was blown away. There was Orlando, his dear wife Grace and their three kittens, Pansy, Blanche and Tinkle. The drawings were superb..the cats almost seemed to move. The story was quite complex, but I mastered it. Funnily enough, I have a copy of Orlando Goes Camping which I read to the grandchildren and it seems so dated now! his ‘Master’ tells him off for smoking! And the female cats do all the cooking and tidying! But the pictures are still as enchanting..

2. What book will always stay with you and why?

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa   I was given this a few weeks ago by a very good friend while I was undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer. It’s definitely not the sort of book I usually read, so I was a bit sceptical when I started it. Oh boy! What a poignant, heart-holding book. Loved it. Mind, having a cat of my own does help! It is very quirky, and told partly in the voice of Nana, the cat, so you have to suspend your disbelief rather a lot, but it is beautifully written.

3. One book you are looking forward to reading?

The next novel by Robert Harris. Big fan. I’ve just finished Munich, his latest novel, so it will be a while until the new one is published. Some writers just manage to sustain a high level of prose, character delineation and story book after book after book. Harris is one of those writers. Few manage it, but he does in spades.

Diamonds and Dust

When a horrific murder takes place on a dark night in 1860’s London, it changes two women for ever. New light is cast upon past lives they thought they knew so well, and suddenly their futures become intertwined.

The death of her uncle will leave eighteen-year-old Josephine King an orphan, an heiress and the owner of a priceless diamond, The Eye of the Khan. For Lilith Marks, a chance finally arises to end her life as a highly paid prostitute and to prove herself as a serious businesswoman.

Set against the backdrop of the great gas-lit city, the two women are drawn together in their quest to discover just who killed the man they both loved.

Diamonds & Dust is a page-whizzing narrative, with an intricate and absorbing plot that entices you through the teeming streets of Victorian London. If Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all washed up on a desert island, they might have come up with something like this.