The Decision is here in paperback!

Hallo!

Can’t believe it’s June (nor could anybody else, looking out of the window at our glorious summer  weather…!) and The Decision is out in paperback right now. It’s got a different cover from the hardback, of a girl running down stairs wearing a red mac and black tights (dressed for the English summer, you could say) and the spooky thing about that was that when I went in to see my editor and the team at (wonderful) Headline, what was I wearing? A red mac, identical colour, and black  tights. So obviously we were made for each other, my cover and me. Incidentally, you could have your own red Burberry trench coat if you enter our competition - just click here to enter.

And now, it seems to be everywhere I look, on posters at stations and on the London Underground and even on dazzling LCD screens at Westfield shopping malls. The White City one is actually quite dangerous; for some obscure (very obscure) subliminal reason, I found myself compelled to go and buy all sorts of things on the strength of it. I now have a black Burberry, for instance, and a whole lot of suitable-for-the-sun (even more obscure) clothes, and two pairs of extremely expensive shoes. I blame the author…

The build up has been fun, too, not least a marvelous 24 hours at the Good Housekeeping Wing (my words, not theirs) of the Hay Literary Festival. Lindsay Nicholson, their editorial director, was kind enough to invite me; and there over a delicious dinner, readers could sit and listen to speeches from  Alan Titchmarsh, Kay Burley and Val McDermid, all amazingly impressive and entertaining; and then at lunch the next day, from Prue Leith, Kathy Lette (equally so) and me. Well I hope I was a bit. We stayed in an extremely beautiful country house hotel, called Llangoed Hall, once the home of the Ashley family; and the food was wonderful too. I tell you it’s tough at the top…

The only (literally) damp squib cast over things was that the torrential rain that poured ceaselessly down for the entire twenty four hours flooded the bookshop. …and indeed the whole of the Hay Festival site looked more like Glastonbury than its usual summery self.

It was particularly nice for me to talk to Good Housekeeping readers, because long ago, I wrote a monthly column for the magazine and very flatteringly lots of them remembered it. I felt like I’d come home…
Perhaps the crowning moment of the whole day for me (hopeless cook that I am) was when Prue Leith confessed in her talk that she couldn’t make cakes…

The Jubilee has also happened around this time; I know everyone has their own moment to tell about; my most special one was being high on a hilltop in Oxfordshire, with a band playing God Save the Queen, while one of the beacons was lit. Reader, I cried.

It’s been a wonderful summer so far, weather apart; and anyway, as I’m always saying, our weather defines us... (Quite what that makes us I’m not sure, apart from extremely hardy…)
Anyway, if you haven’t read The Decision in hardback, (or on your Kindle) I really hope you will now. And that you enjoy it.

Penny.