Today marks the publication of the new psychological thriller from author, Thorne Moore and as promised, Thorne has stopped by with a great guest post, to kick off the celebrations!
First of all, a little reminder about the new book, then I’ll hand you straight over to Thorne, to introduce herself …
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MOTHERLOVE
Three mothers – 1990
Heather is horrified to be pregnant again.
Gillian is desperate to adopt.
Lindy is terrified her baby will be taken from her.
In the midst of all this longing and pain, a child disappears.
Two babies – Now
Vicky finds out she’s not who she thought she was.
Kelly loves her mother. Wanting to help her, she innocently reveals deeply buried secrets.
One desperate woman
Every day a woman goes to a park, still trying to understand an event 22 years earlier that tore her life apart.
But all these stories are connected. Can one of them learn the truth without tearing apart the lives of everyone else?
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Hi! I’m THORNE MOORE
I grew up in Luton, in a very politically aware family (i.e. left-wing) and was firmly advised to study law. This would have implied a career in law, so since I intended to be a writer, not a lawyer, I read history at Aberystwyth university instead.
Much much later, and far more impressively, with much blood, sweat and tears, I gained my law degree from the Open University, when it was far too late to be tempted to put it to any use.
I worked in a busy reference library for some years, then moved to West Wales to set up a restaurant with my sister and I now live just outside a North Pembrokeshire village, where I run a craft business and occasionally teach family history – but mostly write.
If I want to write, I write. So just do it. If you think that making time for writing is a problem, just wait until you finish a book, and find a great aching desert of emptiness stretching before you.
The Question Is…
I write novels which are more concerned with motivation and effect than with who, when and where; because, for me, characters provide the central element of a good story. Just to be conventional, I am willing to concede that a novel also needs a plot, to carry the reader from A to B, preferably by a rollercoaster of hills and troughs. But I like to start with an underlying question that triggers the enterprise and gets me wondering.
In my first novel, A Time For Silence, the plot involves a young woman, in the 21st century, discovering a family secret from the middle of the 20th century, and her investigations, discoveries and misconceptions are contrasted with the story of what really happened, back in the 1930s and 40s.
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The Question Is … Is it ever possible to understand a historical event, whether it’s the court of the Tudors, the mean streets of Victorian London, or your own grandparent’s lives, if you can only see it through your own imagination, shaped by your own education, economics, class, religion, expectation, social mores and language? I’ve read many historical novels where the characters cannot help having modern views and attitudes, no matter what velvets and brocades they wear.
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In my second novel, Motherlove (to be published by Honno Press on February 19th), the question that got me going was raised by the case of María Eugenia Sampallo Barragán. Maria Eugenia is an Argentinian. She’d known from childhood that she was adopted, but finally she discovered that she had been taken, at birth, from a clandestine torture centre, where her Communist birth parents, were ‘disappeared’ by the military government. She had been handed over as a prize to a couple who were supporters of the regime. Maria Eugenia made the world news because she was taking her adoptive parents to court.
The interest, for me, had nothing to do with gory Argentinian politics. I wondered what her relationship with her adoptive parents had been like. Surely, I thought, it must have been unhappy, because if she had grown up secure, as their loving and beloved daughter, she would have been torn to shreds by the idea of taking them to court, no matter how awful the truth turned out to be.
My assumption turned out to be correct: Maria Eugenia had had an unhappy childhood and had left home resenting her adoptive parents. By contrast, some of the other adopted children of the ‘disappeared,’ who loved their adoptive parents, didn’t even want to know who their birth parents were.
My book, Motherlove, has nothing whatsoever to do with Argentina, or Maria Eugenia’s story, but it does concern two girls who find they are not the natural daughters of the women they call mother. One is happy with the family she has, and couldn’t give a toss about the truth. The other finds that the genetic confusion merely reinforces a sense of alienation that she already feels.
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The Question Is … Does the love of a child for a mother have anything at all to do with genetic bonds, and can it simply be snapped in two if those bonds turn out to be an illusion?
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I hope that readers manage to unearth the underlying questions in my novels. I am always delighted to read comments from people who like my work, but the comments which give me the greatest satisfaction are the ones that tell me the reader was left thinking.
Thank you for taking the time to stop by, it was great to meet you all and I hope that you enjoy Motherlove.
Thorne Moore
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Thanks for stopping by Thorne. I look forward to reading Motherlove myself and would like to wish you every success with both this book and any future projects. It was a pleasure to meet you 🙂
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