Historical fiction author Caroline Warfield is kindly hosting me at her blog today, to talk a little about the textile background to The Clothier’s Daughter. Please come over and say hello!
For this coming week only, the e-book of The Clothier’s Daughter is at a very special price of just 99c (US) or $1.49 (Aus)*. So it’s a great chance to pick it up for a song, make a cup of tea, and curl up for a good read! But hurry – the sale ends on 18th November.
In The Clothier’s Daughter, the heroine, Emma Braithwaite, has second cousins who run a rival business, the old Braithwaite family company having been split into two when their respective grandfathers argued.
I’ve always been fascinated by genealogy and started asking about my own family tree when I was still in primary school—which got both my parents started on many decades of family history research, on both sides of the family.
So, naturally, when I was writing The Clothier’s Daughter, I had to work out the Braithwaite family history. If you’ve read the book and wondered about the family connections, I’ve drawn up a family tree to illustrate them. It’s a PDF file, and you can download it by clicking on the link:
The Caldwell family tree is less complicated (at least in terms of the characters in the first book in the series!), so here’s the order of the ten children of George Adam Caldwell, the 5th Earl of Rengarth and his wife Caroline (clearly a healthy woman with little difficulty bearing children, and happily in love with her husband!):
George, 6th Earl of Rengarth, b. 1785, m. Hannah
Adam, b. 1787
Oliver, b. 1788
Louisa, b. 1790
Phoebe, b. 1792
Lilian, b. 1794
Susanna, b. 1798
Jeremy, b. 1800
Cecilia, b. 1802
Benamin, b. 1805
And yes, I do have ideas for books for many of these characters—the Braithwaite and Caldwell families are full of interesting people who live full lives!
Thank you to everyone who has supported my new book, The Clothier’s Daughter, by buying, reviewing, asking their library for it, or by spreading the word about it. It’s a new sub-genre for me so every little bit helps, and I’m very grateful!
Paperbacks are now available to order through the major online sellers. If you’d like to ask your local bookseller or library to order it in, the ISBN of the paperback is 9780994197047, and it’s available through Ingram Spark. If you live in regional Queensland or Darwin you’re in luck – it’s already available in many libraries there!
If you live in Australia, you can also order a signed paperback from me – see the Buy Books page for details. Unfortunately, international postage is prohibitively expensive, so I can’t send signed copies overseas.
I’ve uploaded a PDF preview of the first two chapters – click on the download link below. Readers who prefer ebooks should be able to download a sample from their preferred ebook seller, but I know that many readers prefer print. So here’s a print-formatted sample!
We had a wonderful book launch earlier this month at Boobooks, a local second-hand bookshop. My lovely niece Lauren was able to fly up from Canberra for the weekend.
Not only did Lauren design the cover and format the print book, she is the model on the cover. She brought the cover dress with her, but it was a bit chilly to wear it. My friend Debbie leant us a mannequin, so we dressed it up with pearls in the hair, just like on the book cover.
Several friends contributed food for the event, adding to the hummus and choc fudge I made, and my friend Nancy raided her winter garden for flowers, including this lovely posy.
Yvonne, one of the co-owners of Boobooks, interviewed me about the book. Here’s me, waving my hands as I answered a question.
The signing table provided was wonderful – a genuine antique card table! Here, I’m signing a book for my friend Katinka.
It was a lovely launch and I appreciate and am grateful to everyone who contributed and attended.
I know I posted in January that this would be coming soon…but then I unexpectedly went into hospital, and around the same time I also realised that the last quarter of the book wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. My apologies for the delay! It’s been a mad few months, but The Clothier’s Daughter is now finished, edited, proofread, and will be published in a few days – Thursday 11th July. The ebook is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Kobo, Apple and other ebook sellers. There will be a paperback version, but that won’t be ready for a couple of weeks. More info on the print version soon!
I do love this book—my first historical romance—and I hope my readers will, too. Here’s the blurb:
In the unusually wet summer of 1816, Emma Braithwaite struggles to keep her family’s traditional wool cloth manufacturing company afloat. Her father has died, her brother is missing, and the new cotton factories are spreading, rendering the fine worsted fabrics the Braithwaites have made for generations, expensive and unfashionable. Being a woman in a man’s world of trade is challenging enough, but when her warehouse catches fire it brings her only a step away from financial ruin and debtor’s prison.
After eight years of war, Major Adam Caldwell is returning for the first time to his family home, Rengarth Castle, when he stops to assist at a warehouse fire … and comes face-to-face with the woman he once loved and lost. Despite all his efforts to forget her, in truth she’s never been far from his thoughts. He was unworthy of her then, and even more so now.
But as the threats against Emma escalate, they discover that someone wants control of Emma’s family company and is prepared to murder anyone in the way of getting it – including Emma.
