BLOG TOUR ~ The Home by Sarah Stovell

Hi Everyone,

Today is my stop for the Blog Tour for The Home by Sarah Stovell where I have an extract from her latest novel. I was thrilled to be asked by Anne Cater from Random Things Tours who organised this tour in conjunction with Orenda Books to take part along with some other fab book bloggers. You can find out who else has taken part in this fabulous Blog Tour at the end of this review so without further ado, here it is:

She always said that if we ever got married, ours would be a black wedding in the tiny stone church by Meddleswater. She wanted the ceremony in the half-light of a December morning, when the lake would lie hard as glass, the church barely visible in the mist from its waters. 

I can picture her now, sweeping up the aisle towards me, no father on her arm, no mother of the bride at the front of the church, no train of bridesmaids behind her. There would be only her, white-faced and spectral, her black dress whispering across the floor, her eyes shrouded behind a veil, and at her throat the choker I bought her. There might be flowers, too – black tulips in her hands, black roses at the altar. 

And we would be married, she and I, and we’d step into another life, the life we’d dreamed was waiting for us after this one, where we could be together without others trying to part us, where no one would tell us we were too young, or too broken, or too fragile to know what we were doing. 

Because we were young, it was true. We were fragile, too. But we weren’t fragile like flowers. We were fragile like bombs.

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This isn’t how we’d planned it. They’ve just found her on the ground outside the church, wailing beside my body. 

She’s going to make lots of mistakes over the next few days, but hanging around my corpse is her first. She should have run. She should have run far away from here, back to the arms of strangers, or the arms of anyone who’d have her… 

No one knows what to do with her. The police are murmuring about her age, putting her at around fifteen. They’re right. But on the inside, she’s ancient as the world. We both are. 

They can’t stop her crying. They can’t get her to move. She’s shouting and protesting and holding on to me, but I am already cold. 

I’m furious with her for doing this. She used to say she’d come with me. ‘If you go, I’m going too,’ she’d say, taking my hand in hers and looking me straight in the eye. It was a promise as sacred as a wedding vow, but like everything else between us, it ended up broken long ago. 

I’m going to haunt her. I’m going to make her think she’s losing her mind and tip her slowly over the edge until she can bear it no longer and joins me here. 

Would that be murder? Maybe; but no more murderous than what she’s just done to me.