A Year of New Adventures

A Year of New Adventures by Maddie Please

Published by Avon

April 2018

Billie Summers has always been quite content in her little cottage in the Cotswolds. Sure, half the house hasn’t been renovated, but what’s the point when it’s only her? Working part-time at her uncle’s bookshop and planning writer retreats with her best friend allows her to pay the bills. What more could anyone want?

That is until Oliver Forest, the bad boy of the book world, turns up to one of her retreats and points out that Billie hasn’t done anything very adventurous. Couple that with her best friend falling head over heels and beginning to drift away from their Friday night wine and dinner plans, Billie is starting to wonder if it isn’t time she took control of her life.

So she starts a list: get fitted (properly) for a bra, fix up rest of house, find a ‘career’ and well, get a tattoo … Her life might just get the makeover it needs, too bad irritating and far-too-attractive for his own good, Oliver keeps showing up …

I'm lucky enough to be taking part in the blog tour for the new novel by Maddie Please called A Year of New Adventures and I've been granted a sneaky extract to whet your appetite before the book is published in April this year.  However if you can't wait that long, it is available to download onto your kindle right this instant (or at least until after you have read this extract)!

I once made the mistake of telling my boyfriend how hard it was to write a book and get it published, and Matt sneered and said writing was just drinking coffee and making stuff up. Why would that be difficult? He then added some pithy comments about how many Mint Clubs I had been getting through recently under the guise of plotting. In my defence they were on a BOGOF offer, and of course once they’re in the cupboard …
We broke up soon after that – I put up with a lot from him in our two years together but even I have my limits – still, I think he was partly right. I like Mint Clubs. I’m not ashamed to admit it. OK, I like most things that mix chocolate and biscuits, if I’m honest. Perhaps that’s why my figure is always slightly out of control.
It wasn’t a very merry Christmas last year. We had been about to go to New York as he had finally persuaded me there were holidays to be had outside Europe. I was fizzing with excitement. These sorts of trips were few and far between but Nan had left me a small inheritance that I’d been hanging on to and I’d just been paid for some private pre-Christmas catering, so for once I had some savings.
Unfortunately, I gave the money for my part of the holiday to Matt and I still haven’t got it back. Swine. We had been living together in the tumbledown Cotswold stone cottage my grandmother had been in the middle of renovating when she died. When we split up he left with my holiday to New York, most of my DVDs and all the decent towels.
New Year’s resolution: never do anything spontaneous.
My sister inherited the picture-perfect holiday house in Cornwall. Typical. In her will Nan said Josie ‘needed’ it more than I did. I guess that’s because Josie and Mark have two boys and their school has longer holidays than some members of the British aristocracy, while I had no kids and no prospect of any.
I started trying to write when I was doing English A level, and had just read Forever Amber. I quite fancied being a writer of historical fiction. After all, it didn’t need specialist equipment, formal training, or a particular level of physical fitness; the only thing it did require was aptitude.

Happy Reading

Miss Chapters x