Recently I was featured on the Shepherd Books website, talking about my five favourite books about Titanic and Carpathia. As many of you know I wrote a novel a couple of years ago that feature Titanic (The Lost Sister) and recently I’ve been working on one that features Carpathia, the ship that picked up Titanic’s survivors. This one will be published in November this year.

I love the Shepherd Books website – it’s such a great concept, and a whole new way of finding books you like. I was delighted to see that author Gill Thompson featured my book The Girl from Bletchley Park in her list of books set in WW2 and featuring strong women. All her choices look like excellent reads as that’s a category of books I love too!

Do take a look and try exploring the site, searching for the kind of books or authors you enjoy and see what comes up. They put a huge amount of effort into this website and it’s turning into a wonderful resource to inspire readers.

Also in recent days, my book The Storm Girl was included in boxes sent to subscribers of The Travelling Reader book boxes. Another marvellous concept for those who love to read – each month you’re sent a box containing a book that’s set in a specific area plus a load of goodies from that area! The Storm Girl is set in Dorset and the box contained a Dorset tea towel, a box of Dorset tea, some soap made locally, chocolate biscuits also made locally, a bookmark featuring pictures of The Storm Girl’s setting and a letter from me to the readers, all beautifully packaged up.

I was particularly impressed by the selection of photos tucked into the book. The Storm Girl is set right where I live, and those photos might have been taken by me on one of my many walks in my local area (but they weren’t!) They are exactly the places that inspired my novel.

A subscription to The Travelling Reader boxes would be a wonderful present for someone. It was such fun to open it and see what was inside!