She, You, I by Sally Keeble

Stop in to learn more about She, You, I – a new adult contemporary novel from Sally Keeble. An emotional story of a family torn apart by war. Plus, enter the giveaway for the chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card!

Title: She, You, I
Author: Sally Keeble
Genre: Adult, Contemporary
Release Date: January 11th 2023

About The Book:

An emotional page-turner of a story about a family torn apart by the legacy of war that asks the question: what happens to the hurt we can’t forget?

When Skye Stanhope returns to her grandmother’s childhood home, she’s searching for the roots of her life story. Why her tough-minded granny ran away to war. And why her brilliant mother died.

Behind the women’s successes, lies deep trauma. As Skye strips away the layers of secrecy, she confronts their inner torments: forces that bound the women together, but also tore them apart. It’s a journey from a poverty-stricken tenement block to an airbase in wartime Suffolk, through boom-time London to a coffee cart beside the sea.

Woven into the women’s lives is Tseng Hsiao Ling, a feisty, enigmatic seamstress whose fortunes become inextricably linked with theirs.

It’s a sweeping tale of love, war and family secrets over three generations.

Through each woman’s story, “She, You, I” holds up a mirror to the complexity of family relationships: mothers, sisters, daughters, and the unexpected twists in Skye’s search for closure.

Purchase: Amazon

Excerpt:

“She”

Maisie’s story

She was safe under the bed. Metal strips above, bare boards below, her father’s tin trunk behind—name, rank, number engraved on its lid. “All you need to know about a man,” her father said. A blanket hung over the edge of the bed. Maisie lay behind it and clenched her fists against her chest to keep in the fear.

Tonight was bad.

“Floozy!”

“No!”

Shouts from the kitchen. Them fighting. She curled up and squeezed her eyes shut, covered her ears to make it stop. Anything to make it stop.

“You’re my wife.”

A scream from the kitchen ran through her body. And then another, and another, until the whole night became a scream. She tried to block it out, but she couldn’t. It was inside her ears, inside her head. She was the scream. And then it stopped. She took her hands from her ears and listened. Nothing. Silence.

Maisie lifted the blanket and peered into the room. Gaslight from the street spilt over the tattered strip of net curtain nailed across the window. It glinted off the broken mirror above the empty fireplace, touched the two best chairs on their square of worn carpet, and lit up the locked front door out to the landing of the tenement.

In the far corner was the door into the other room, the kitchen. A spindly table stood next to the door, with a piece of lacey cloth draped over it, “To hide its legs,” her mother said, and on it was china figurine of a man in a kilt with a lamb around his neck and a dog at his feet.

Beside the figurine was a photograph in a round frame of pleated cloth. Her mother, Flora, her hair swept up into a chignon and set with glittery jewels—only glass, she said—sat on a chair and behind her stood a soldier, uniformed, his face unmarked, handsome, with jet-black hair and a wide moustache that curled up at the ends like a smile. Her father, Simon. One arm was crocked behind him, the other stretched along the back of the chair, cradling her mother, and the greys of their clothes swirled around the whites of their faces and blended into the beige of the fabric that enclosed them.

The night the glass in the frame got broken wasn’t as bad as this.

“You”

Julia tells her sister Isla’s story

The Lonely Hearts Club Band played on through that summer while I took you toddling around the garden. It was your talking that finally hooked me. Your eyes didn’t change colour like mine had done, and you would fix me with their baby blueness, and hold out a daisy or a rose petal you’d picked up off the lawn and make babbly noises and then you’d scream with frustration when I couldn’t understand. Until one day when you were babbling away you suddenly came out with “Ju, Ju.” It made me stop. You were so pleased with yourself, you said it again. “Ju-ju.”

Unconditional love is cataclysmic, so I discovered that day. When you held me with your baby blue eyes and said my name, it triggered something deep inside me. Perhaps it’s what a mother feels when she holds her baby for the first time. Perhaps it’s what Mother felt for me once. Or maybe it’s what a lover feels, someone who’s going to follow you to the end of the earth. Like Omar Sharif trudging through the snowstorm in Dr Zhivago to find his beloved Lara. Perhaps someone might feel like that about me one day. But meanwhile I knew for certain I didn’t want to leave home. My love for you was unconditional, and whatever life threw at you, I wanted to be there to help you catch it.

“Ju-ju.”

Everything about that moment stuck.

“I”

Skye’s Story

Our pitch is in a layby down a bank beside a river, near a south coast town. Morning sunlight steals across the water into the clearing where we park our SUV. Kit Ying unhitches the trailer. The grass is still bouncy with dawn dew. Birds sing into emptiness. The air here has a purity that makes you think that because you can see and hear and smell things more clearly, you can understand them better too. Kit Ying says it’s our ground zero. But that doesn’t work, I tell him. That would be an ending. Not an ending, a nothingness, he says. A place to start again.

‘Coffee, tea, tray-bakes,’ I chalk onto the display board we put out on the roadside. I draw floaty stars and underneath Kit Ying writes, ‘Special—pork buns’ and draws some fancy Chinese characters.

“What does that say?”

“That they’re authentic.”

It was hard explaining to Aunt Julia about the coffee cart.

About The Author:

Sally writes novels about the things she’s passionate about—the triumphs and tragedies of people’s lives, their families and life stories.

It’s what originally took her into journalism and then politics, in the UK and beyond. She spent her early years in the USA, Switzerland and Australia, returning to the UK after working as a journalist in South Africa. After serving as an MP, she worked in international development and travelled widely, especially in Africa and South Asia.

“She, You, I” is her first novel. She’s written nonfiction previously. Sally splits her time between Northampton and Bawdsey, a village in coastal Suffolk.

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