Friday Finds : January 23 2009

Romantic Novel of the Year 2009 Shortlist

A few posts ago I mentioned that one of the things I loved about reading and book blogging was that they allowed me to be a part of the wonderful online community of readers and writers.

One person whom I'm very pleased to have 'met' this last week, is author Linda Gillard, whom I got to know from the Bookcrossing forums.

As an aspiring writer myself, I love meeting authors, partly because I hope - quite unrealistically - that some of their talent might rub off on me, but mostly because I have such a huge amount of respect for them, knowing how hard it is for myself to write anything worth reading.

So you can probably understand my awe when I visited her site and found out that not only has she written and published three novels - all with very impressive reviews, her third book, Star Gazing, has also been shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2009!

The shortlist of 6 books has only been recently announced on the 13th of January 2009. The 6 books were chosen by 15 members of the Romantic Novelists' Association, and 3 judges will chose a final winner after reading the 6 shortlisted books.

The six shortlisted authors are:

1. Cecelia Ahern, for Thanks for the Memories

2. Lesley Downer, for The Last Concubine

3. Linda Gillard, for Star Gazing

4. Julia Gregson, for East of the Sun

5. Susanna Kearsley, for Sophia’s Secret

6. Judith Lennox, for Before the Storm

I'm quite excited to have found this list, and I've added some of the books to my ever-growing wishlist and Mount TBR!

My Friday Finds:

Cecilia Ahern's Thanks for the Memories is about a woman who receives somebody else's memories along with his blood in a blood transfusion after a terrible accident. How can I resist a storyline like this?!

Sophia's Secret by Susanna Kearsley is another very interesting book. It is about a bestselling author who visits a place in Scotland where her ancestor, Sophia, lived years ago. She starts writing the fictional life of Sophia but finds that she's writing more fact than fiction when she realizes she has Sophia's memories. What can I say? I enjoy books where someone can get into someone else's head?

And of course, Linda Gillard's Star Gazing, which is about a blind woman, a strange man who shows up on her doorstep one winter's night, and the love that they share.

In her site (you gotta scroll down a little), Linda talks about how she went about writing the book and what a challenge it was to describe landscape from a non-visual point of view. Especially challenging was describing the hero by the way he sounded, felt, and smelt!

I am positively intrigued! And very happy because I've been looking for some good romances to read! I think I'm going to love these.

The winner will be announced on the 10th of February! I'm so excited!

For more information about the Romantic Novel of the Year 2009, you can visit the official site.