It's launch Day for WHERE THE SKY BEGINS - Rhy's Wonderful New WWII Novel!

RHYS BOWEN: Today I am celebrating my new stand-alone novel called WHERE THE SKY BEGINS.

 

This was not my first title. Nor my tenth. It was a compromise between the marketing gurus at Amazon (who I suspect are all twenty-year old male computer geeks) and my editors, agents and me.

 

I wanted to call it THE TEASHOP AT THE EDGE OF ETERNITY.   I still love that title but…

 

I was told it’s too many words. Hard to read on an Amazon thumbnail.  Also teashop is not a word that would attract male readers. Put them off.  So, we tried other directions:

 

We know that these days titles with WOMAN, GIRL, DAUGHTER, WIFE seem to work well.

 

The Woman from London? The Woman from the Rubble? The Soldier’s Wife? The woman who got bombed and moved out into the country and met a pilot? None of them sounded right. And heaven knows we don’t need any more books with daughter, wife, girl in the title, do we?

 

 So it takes place beside an RAF base. Night flight? Flight into danger?  They sounded too male oriented war stories. At the End of the Runway?  That sounded too fashion oriented.

 

 

Enigmatic titles seem to be the thing these days: Where the Crawdad’s Sing, All the Light we Cannot See…. So we played with the setting—the flat, wide expanse of Lincolnshire after the narrowness of London streets. The House on the Marsh. The House at the Edge of… again too many words. Bombed? Buried? Reborn? 

 

And I realize that what strikes my heroine most as she is transported out of London is that she sees the sky for the first time. At home, between narrow streets, there is often smog from coal fires, rarely a clear blue sky, and here the sky seems to go on forever. It’s an important image and the word BEGINS indicates the character having a chance to start a new life. 

 

It’s funny how certain titles come into fashion, almost for no reason. I have a new Lady Georgie book coming out in November called PERIL IN PARIS. And I see that there are so many books called PERIL IN… this year. Should I be flattered that they are all jumping on this bandwagon?  Or is it just coincidence?  There certainly were enough variants on the Twelve Clues of Christmas after that book came out!

What do you think of the title? What sort of titles attract you and make you pick up a book?  

 

WHERE THE SKY BEGINS  London, 1940. Bombs fall and Josie Banks’s world crumbles around her. Her overbearing husband, Stan, is unreachable, called to service. Her home, a ruin of rubble and ash. Josie’s beloved tearoom boss has been killed, and Josie herself is injured, with nothing left and nowhere to go.

Evacuated to the English countryside, Josie ends up at the estate of the aristocratic Miss Harcourt, a reluctant host to the survivors of the Blitz. Awed as she is by the magnificent landscape, Josie sees opportunity. Josie convinces Miss Harcourt to let her open a humble tea shop, seeing it as a chance for everyone to begin again. When Josie meets Mike Johnson, a handsome Canadian pilot stationed at a neighboring bomber base, a growing intimacy brings her an inner peace she’s never felt before. Then Stan returns from the war.

Now a threat looms larger than anyone imagined. And a dangerous secret is about to upend Josie’s life again. Her newfound courage will be put to the test if she is to emerge, like a survivor, triumphant.