#GuestPost #JuliaRoberts #AliceinTheatreland #BlogTour
It’s summer
1976; London is languishing in the sultry heat. Beautiful and talented nineteen-year-old,
Alice Abbott, arrives in the city with high hopes of one day seeing her name up
in lights but first she must impress Richard, the producer of a new West End
show, Theatreland.
Alice is befriended
at the audition by the more experienced Gina, who, although burdened by her own
dark secrets, is determined to protect the newcomer from the sleaze behind the
glamour. She also attracts attention from the male lead in the show, Peter, a former
pop star struggling to escape his playboy reputation.
Alice’s star
seems to be rising as fast as the temperature until she naively accepts an
impromptu dinner invitation from Richard. What happened that night? And how far
will Richard go to protect his guilty secret?
Today I am thrilled to welcome Julia Roberts to my blog with a guest post! Thanks ever so much for popping along Julia and for letting me part of your blog tour for your latest book!
Thanks very much Katherine for inviting me on to your blog!
Alice in Theatreland is my fourth full-length novel and the first one that has
a suspense/thriller edge to it. I really enjoyed developing new characters
after my Liberty Sands trilogy. The book centres around the title character,
nineteen-year-old provincial dancer,
Alice, and her introduction to the sometimes cut-throat world of West End
theatre shows, but there are three other key players who I thought I would
introduce you to.
Richard is the theatre impresario for whom Alice is
auditioning. He is a really unpleasant human-being as we discover immediately
when we first meet him in chapter two – however, that is merely the tip of the
iceberg. The plot really centres around his behaviour towards Alice and how far
he will ultimately go to protect his sordid secret. His only saving grace is
his adoration of his spoilt daughter, Miriam.
Peter is the star of the Theatreland show. He is a former
pop-star who Alice had a crush on when she was a younger teenager and she is
besotted with him when he starts to show an interest in her. However, Peter is
struggling to escape his playboy reputation and after being photographed
leaving a London nightspot with another girl, Alice feels she can no longer
trust him.
The fourth key player is Gina. I know we shouldn’t have
favourites among our children or our pets but I must confess I grew fonder and
fonder of her character as the story developed. Coming from a very rough
upbringing with an absent father and a drug-addict mother, Gina has made some
poor life choices, including going to work as a hostess at a London night-club
when her dancing jobs were few and far between. She is afraid of her boss
there, Franco, who openly threatens the girls at the Ostrich Club if they don’t
toe the line.
Gina befriends Alice at the audition for Theatreland, sticking up
for her when the other girls are being bitchy about her and taking her in when
she has nowhere to live, but her actions later in the book place Alice in
serious danger.
All the way through the book, Gina’s fate was sealed but when
it came to writing it I found myself struggling with what I had planned.
Did I
manage to write my original ending?... I couldn’t possibly say without spoiling
the story.
Well now we are all seriously intrigued! Thanks Julia for giving us a taste of the characters we will meet in your novel! Good luck with its publication!
Don't forget to check out the other stops on the Blog Tour!
JULIA ROBERTS
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Julia
Roberts’ passion for writing began when, at the age of ten, after
winning second prize in a short story-writing competition, she announced that
she wanted to write a book. After a small gap of forty-seven years, and a
career in the entertainment industry, Julia finally fulfilled her dream in 2013
when her first book, a memoir entitled One Hundred Lengths of the Pool, was
published by Preface Publishing. Two weeks later she had the idea for her first
novel, Life’s a Beach and Then…, book one in the Liberty Sands Trilogy, which
was released in May 2015.
Julia still works full-time as a Presenter for the TV
channel QVC, where she has recently celebrated her twenty-third anniversary.
She now lives in Ascot with her partner of thirty-nine years
and occasionally one or other of her adult children and their respective cats.
You can find out more about Julia and her upcoming books on
her Facebook page
www.facebook.com/JuliaRobertsTV and her website
www.juliarobertsauthor.com
You can
also follow her on Twitter @JuliaRobertsTV
Other Books By
Julia Roberts
Life’s
a Beach and Then… (Liberty Sands trilogy, book one)
If He
Really Loved Me… (Liberty Sands trilogy, book two)
It’s
Never Too Late to Say… (Liberty Sands trilogy, book three)
Time
for a Short Story
The
Shadow of Her Smile (free short story on www.juliarobertsauthor.com)
One
Hundred Lengths of the Pool
Amazon
short link
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