My Monthly Indie E-book.
I'm having a lot of fun trawling through the world of independently published E-books and finding some brilliant reads. Like hard-copy books, there's a deep morass of crap to wade through, but the cream has a habit of rising to the top. I rely on recommendations. There are now several E-book review sites to help you choose, including Cally Wight's new Indie E-Book Review, and the Indie E-book Collective on the amazing Good Reads review site is fantastic. Amazon's Kindle reviews are also useful - if a book has more than 20 five star reviews, they can't all be written by the author's family - can they?
Roz Morris is a best-selling children's author and ghost-writer under a number of alias's. She moonlights on her own account, writing literary fiction with a twist, and has opted to publish her adult novels herself as E-books after finding her publishers less than keen to support her change of tack. Why they didn't want this one is beyond me! Apparently they didn't like the para-normal element. Still, it's out-selling many of the conventionally published books on Amazon at the moment, so that must make Roz smile all the way to the bank.
My Memories of a Future Life explores the world of professional classical musicians and the less respectable world of the mediums/spiritual healers who specialise in regressing people through their past lives. Roz Morris' original take on this was, what if, under hypnosis, the subject wanders into a future life? ‘I thought ..... Who would do that? Why? What would they find?' Having read Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, which also explores the murky lives of charlatans preying on the vulnerability of their clients, I was quite intrigued by the subject matter. What I got was a first class page-turner.
It's a romance and thriller woven together. Some reviewers have compared it to the The Time Traveller's Wife. The writing is strong and original and the plot really carries you along. As a writer who has suffered from RSI, I really could empathise with Carol, a gifted pianist whose wrists hurt too much to play and who doesn't know what else to do with her life. Through her flatmate she comes into contact with a spiritualist healer and begins to experience the dark underworld of the paranormal. She is thoroughly sceptical and manages to keep her common sense intact while her life suffers a number of earthquake moments. It was an excellent read.
Kathleen - it's so funny you mention Hilary Mantel's book. When I was kicking around ideas for MMOAFL, I did a lot of research into the world of psychics. A stand-out was going to a show where a spiritualist claimed to be contacting the dead relatives of people in the audience - but was obviously grasping ideas out of thin air and finding vulnerable people who would play along. Beyond Black was on my reading list, but somehow I never got round to it - perhaps I'd seen so much charlatanry in reality that I didn't need to read fiction about it too. So Hilary Mantel's book descended further and further down my Amazon wish list, until you mention it here... spooky!
ReplyDeleteRoz's book sounds fascinating. I've been intrigued by the title, and now I'm even more interested. I live in New-Agey California, where belief in spiritualism and past-life regression is common, so Beyond Black sounds like a must-read, too. Thanks for the great review.
ReplyDeleteI've always been interested in the paranormal - the north of England was a bastion of the Spiritualist church in the 20th century. My grandmother claimed to see ghosts, she read palms and taught us all to play the Weedgie board (as she called it) when we were kids. It was all spooky and great fun, but I grew up to be a sceptic. Happy to keep an open mind though!
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