Thank you for inviting me onto your blog. Today I’d like to talk about my book in what I hope will be a Family Saga series, Unspoken. The story features Alice as both a teenager and as a 100-year-old lady at the end of her life.
When we first meet Alice
in 1938, she is a typical teenager for the era. She and her soul-mate, Amy are
obsessed with film stars, clothes, and music played on Amy’s HMV, wind up
gramophone. Alice is naïve, an only child,
and has had quite an easy childhood, (for the times,) and knows nothing of
boys, or men, other than what she sees in the movies or reads in her Agatha
Christie novels. She is suddenly thrown into a different world where she is
forced to learn very quickly about the real motives of older men, who want to
take advantage of both her and her legacy. Her mother is dead, her father is in
an alcohol-fuelled decline, and Alice is forced to take on the running of the
family farm whilst coping with being a single, pregnant, eighteen-year-old in
an era where women were blamed for bringing such unfortunate events onto
themselves.
By the end of the story,
Alice has matured and discovers that she is not a mere plaything for men, that
men are weak and can be manipulated to serve her own needs, on her own terms.
Alice vows that having discovered her new-found powers, she will never again
allow a man to have a say, either in her own future or in the affairs of the
family business, which she runs with increasing success. She becomes a rarity,
an independent woman in an age of subservience.
Unspoken means something that cannot be uttered aloud. Unspoken is the dark secret a woman must keep, for life.
Alice is fast approaching her one hundredth birthday and she is dying. Her strange, graphic dreams of ghostly figures trying to pull her into a tunnel of blinding light are becoming more and more vivid and terrifying. Alice knows she only has a short time left and is desperate to unburden herself of a dark secret, one she has lived with for eighty years.
Jessica, a journalist, is her great granddaughter and a mirror image of a young Alice. They share dreadful luck in the types of men that come into their lives.
Alice decides to share her terrible secret with Jessica and sends her to the attic to retrieve a set of handwritten notebooks detailing her young life during the late 1930s. Following the death of her invalid mother and her father’s decline into depression and alcoholism, she is forced, at 18 to take control of the farm. On her birthday, she meets Frank, a man with a drink problem and a violent temper.
When Frank’s abusive behaviour steps up a level. Alice seeks solace in the arms of her smooth, ‘gangster lawyer’ Godfrey, and when Frank discovers the couple together, he vows to get his revenge.
Unspoken. A tale that spans two eras and binds two women, born eighty years apart.
His short stories have been published in various anthologies
including 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan, Another Haircut,
Shambelurkling and Other Stories, Deck the Halls, 100 Stories for Queensland
and The Cafe Lit anthology 2011, 2012 and 2013. He also has two pieces in
Shambelurklers Return. 2014
Trevor is also the author of 15 children's books written
under the name of Trevor Forest.
His children's poem, Clicking Gran, was long listed for the
Plough prize (children's section) in 2009 and his short poem, My Mistake, was
rated Highly Commended and published in an anthology of the best entries in the
Farringdon Poetry Competition.
Trevor's articles have been published in magazines as diverse
as Ireland's Own, The Best of British and First Edition.
Trevor is currently working on the sequel to Unspoken; The
Legacy, due for publication in March 2021.
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