BLOG TOUR ~ The Day She Can't Forget by Meg Carter

Hi Everyone,

Today is my stop on the Blog Tour for The Day She Can't Forget by Meg Carter & I'd like to welcome Meg to my blog today where Meg has very kindly written a guest piece for me as part of the Blog Tour. I was thrilled to be asked by Darran Stobbart & Canelo Publishing to take part along with some other fab book bloggers too.  You can find out who else is taking part in this fabulous Blog Tour below & I am currently reading The Day She Can't Forget & will be posting my review soon so keep an eye on my blog. So without further ado, here it is:

PAST IMPERFECT, FUTURE UNCERTAIN by Meg Carter

Family lies, buried secrets and a search for the truth are a rich seam in popular fiction – and rightly so. For as in real life, irrespective of whether what’s hidden is small and trivial or a body under the patio, concealment can distort the present while revelation can cleanse.

Which is why for me, the relationship between past, present and future is a recurrent theme. 

In my new novel The Day She Can’t Forget, published by Canelo on October 24, the protagonist, Zeb, is haunted by events that took place in the months before she was bornfollowing the death of her father – a shocking and painful past she must understand and come to terms with before she can move on. 

Meanwhile in The Lies We Tell - my first novel, which was published last year – former school friends Kat and Jude must lay to rest events that led up to the last time they saw each other 20 years earlier when, on a school trip to a remote, heathland beauty spot, they girls accosted by a man who Jude pulled into the bushes leaving Kat to away. 

Never knowing her friend’s fate, Kat tries to bury the past but lives life under its shadow until, eventually, Jude gets back in contact.

If you don’t know where you are from, you don’t know where you are. And if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you are going, to paraphrase novel and playwright Caryl Philips, in a recent radio interview. Much of his writing, which has explored themes surrounding the African slave trade, addresses a specific of how where we come from shapes our identity. Yet the idea of how our past shapes our present and, in turn, our future is both universal and every day.

In The Day She Can’t Forget another character, Alma, is bound by her past – in particular, one dreadful event she was directly involved in which she can never escape. Yet for she and Zeb, events in the present ultimately provide a deeper understanding and acceptance of past events that will, hopefully, result in a brighter future.

All of us have something in our past – a specific event, even – that, if we think about it carefully, helped shape for better, for worse just who are today. For one close friend, it is the knowledge her mother gave her up for adoption at the age of three: a critical event in her personal history she held off from examining more closely until the months leading up to her wedding. 

‘Standing on the verge of a new life, with someone else, the time seemed right to lay the past to rest,’ she said.

Hidden secrets and our decision about whether to unearth them (or, indeed, to bury them more deeply) is both a fact of life and a powerful way to create complex and compelling multi-dimensional characters, too.  And as a writer, I have to be honest, here: it’s fun to be a secret keeper.

 The Day She Can’t Forget by Meg Carter is out now from Canelo  & is currently priced £3.99 in eBook at the time of publication of this post.

 The Day She Can't Forget by Meg Carter Ebook