FLY OR FALL

Perhaps she is worrying for nothing. Perhaps, after moving out of London to a strange town, she will settle quickly and put down roots. Why does she fear their move up in the world? Why isn't she looking forward to a life where penny-pinching is consigned to the past?  Being comfortable, having money in the bank, living in the manicured suburbs ... will this life undermine her principles? Surely not?

FLY OR FALL took many years to write. I started and stopped, put it away and got it out again. There are several reasons for this which I won't go into now, but it was also a difficult story to write. It has a larger cast of characters than I’d ever handled before, and the plot was complicated. There were a lot of balls I needed to keep in the air.

Each of the protagonists has a history, they each have flaws and failings, they each keep secrets, but.... They are secrets I do not want my reader - or my heroine - to know until the time is right!

A Man up a Ladder
 seems a prosaic image but, believe me,
 it has significance!

Wife and mother, Nell, fears change, but it is forced upon her by her manipulative husband, Trevor. She feels stranded in an unfamiliar landscape, far away from old friends. And there's no comfort to be found in the house they've moved into. It feels like she's living in a building site.

Straightforward and honest, Nell is a woman whose default position is to take life at face value, to believe others’ accounts of themselves.  She’s not stupid, but it never crosses her mind that others are not like her; that the people in her life might deceive and hide and lie.
Halfway through the story, the friends she’s made and the casual infidelity which permeates the atmosphere in which she now lives, tempt her into making a fatal mistake. It is only then that she begins to realise that nothing is as it seems. Everyone - even her nearest and dearest - has been lying. She’s even deluded herself. Some of the deceptions are serious, some trivial, but it’s like a house of cards.  Take one away and everything begins to topple. And when an unlikely love blossoms from the wreckage, she believes it has no future.

Everything in the life of the woman who feared change, is irrevocably altered. But has she been broken, or has she transformed herself? Will she fly or will she fall?