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