Lots of you here are writers and know what it's like to have a new book out, to be releasing your offspring into the world and hoping it will have a wonderful life.
All of you here are readers and the growth of audio here on Substack tells me that adults love hearing stories just as much as children. It’s a soothing, communal way to take in a book or get a flavour of it. A wonderful way to enter another world and let the magic of a story take you on a journey. Reading and listening are such co-creative, joyful activities.
So I’d love you to join me for the launch of smiling at grief in a house in a forest where life grows.
The online launch is free to register for and will take place on Zoom — bring snacks, bring your favourite drink, settle in for story and chat for 60-90 minutes on a June evening and help me launch the book into the world. The online launch is on Saturday June 22, 7.00p.m. BST
And if you live or are in the vicinity of Finistère on June 20 you are also most welcome to join us for the live launch. It’s at the café-bookshop, L’Autre Rive (which is also where the novel is set in 2065) on Thursday 20 June at 6.00 pm. The address is L’Autre Rive, Restidiou Vras, Berrien, 29690. The café serves soft drinks, beer, wine, cider, herbal teas, great coffee and homemade cakes and it’s a free event. You’re welcome to let me know you are coming or just turn up. It will be wonderful to see you.
This is what Catherine Coldstream, who you may recently have listened to when she was interviewd by Katherine May, has to say about the book:
Jan Fortune’s new novel is an intriguing exploration of our human connection to the earth and to each other. In a future that feels like the past, a group of forest dwellers grows beyond the trauma of social and environmental collapse, to find wisdom not only through each other but through the plant life that surrounds them. While bleakly prophetic, the novel holds out the possibility of redemption through nature, in human stories interwoven with the subtle scents and secrets of the herbalist’s knowledge, lore, and craft. A book to savour for its wide botanical erudition and wise heart.
Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered
Summer Solstice 2065 and, awake before dawn, Viola knows that all her ghosts are with her as she sets off into the forest to forage the last of the ingredients for the Solstice feast that falls on her 40th birthday and on the birthday of Isabelle, the oldest member of the tiny hamlet at 93.
It’s sixteen years since the pandemic that wiped out huge swathes of humanity only to be followed by the collapse of the structures of daily life that once seemed unassailable. Tucked away in the forest, the inhabitants of Restidiou Vras have their herbalist, Viola; they have skills and animals, homes and loved ones. But they carry their ghosts into an increasingly uncertain future and, as the inhabitants of the surviving twelve households gather for the longest day, they bring stories of loss, their resentments and fears, their hopes and secrets. Thirty-three adults and eleven children who know that a single day can change everything.
But in the forest, the humans are not the only voices. The trees and plants have their own stories of loss and resurrection, of abuse and forgiveness, of another way of living.
How exciting!!
Oh félicitations..! Jan your book sounds and looks truly beautiful - I wish could join your gathering for the launch too but sadly that is the weekend I must spend in Toulouse moving my daughter from one apartment to another… I am not looking forward to it even slightly…