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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

DEAD TO ME



Penguin Random House has announced that novelist Lesley Pearse will be coming to South Africa in May 2017! The publishing house will host Pearse in a series of events as she promotes the paperback release of Dead to Me in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. Her latest novel is also set to be released later this year.

Dead to Me deals with Ruby and Verity who met as girls and come from different worlds. Verity was privately educated, living in a beautiful Hampstead home, while Ruby was being raised in extreme poverty. Nevertheless, they became firm friends. However, fortunes are not set in stone and soon the girls find their situations reversed. As Ruby goes up in the world, Verity encounters more and more tragedy, but still the girls remain a large part of each other's lives. That is, until one day in 1938 when Ruby says the terrible words 'You're dead to me' and it looks like their friendship might be over for good…

Lesley Pearse is one of the UK's best-loved novelists with fans across the globe and sales of over 10 million copies of her books to date. A true storyteller and a master of gripping storylines that keep the reader hooked from beginning to end, she introduces readers to characters that it is impossible not to care about or forget. Truth is often stranger than fiction and her life has been as packed with drama as her books. She was three when her mother died under tragic circumstances. Her father was away at sea and it was only when a neighbour saw Pearse and her brother playing outside without coats on that suspicion was aroused. With her father in the Royal Marines, Pearse and her older brother spent three years in grim orphanages before her father remarried – a veritable dragon of an ex-army nurse – and Pearse and her older brother were brought home again, to be joined by two other children who were later adopted by her father and stepmother, and a continuing stream of foster children.

The impact of constant change and uncertainty in her early years is reflected in one of the recurring themes in her books: what happens to those who are emotionally damaged as children. It was an extraordinary childhood and in all her books, Pearse has skilfully married the pain and unhappiness of her early experiences with a unique gift for storytelling. Her most recent novels include Dead to Me, Without a Trace, Survivor, Forgive Me and The Promise.

ISBN 9781405921046