BOOK CORNER 18. Chip Shop Chips or Homebaked Cake? It would be sadistic to make me choose. 19. Favourite crisp flavour? My relationship with crisps has been a troubled one. I used
to love Smoky Bacon flavour, but after I got chicken pox they never tasted the same again. After that it was Wotsits, but I had to eat forty packets of them to save up for a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles watch. I can’t even look at someone eating them now.
20. The best biscuit? Biscuits are a scandalous waste of calories that you could spend on cake.
The Festival is out now on eBook, and out in paperback on the 29th April. Four Women Orly, Lenny, Mel and Thea have been best friends since school. But now it is 20 years later and inevitably they have drifted apart. One Weekend It is Lenny’s 40th birthday, plus Orly and Mel need cheering up, so Thea suggests a weekend away at a festival in their hometown. It’s a chance for them all to reconnect. Not all of them will survive. But their holiday soon takes a sinister turn, and not all of the friends will leave the festival alive... Dazzlingly inventive’ - Sunday Times ‘A meticulously plotted exploration of friendship, foe-ship and the lies that bind, which builds to a gripping and powerful conclusion’ - Cara Hunter ‘The perfect dose of thrills and suspense, this will keep you engrossed to the very end’ Heat ‘Tautly thrilling . . . This has hit thriller written all over it’ - Evening Telegraph
I started reading The Festival in publication week, just to get ahead of interviewing Sarah. This was a bad idea - I do not have time to read for fun in publication week. And yet... it just kept luring me back, and in bite-sized chunks and ever more frequent teabreaks I find myself writing this having almost-but-not-
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quite-finished. And I’m on tenterhooks. By the time you’re reading this I’ll know the ending. The story moves between the four women - and yet it never feels awkward. You spend enough time with each to know them, to understand their lives, see their flaws, and want to go for a drink with them anyway. And the friendships are as complicated and imperfect as any we all know from our teenage years. The view of motherhood is so
recognisable, and yet different for them all. The faint dark whispers of tension start early, and the echoes of it building with ever increasing speed until a pumpingly noisy, tired, oh-sofamilar festival fairground feels physically assaulting to your brain... and that’s all I can tell you, because that’s where I’m up to. Even now, without knowing the ending, I’m strongly suggesting you call Wayne at Winstones and pre-order this one. Always free - subscribe here
