Good Neighbours edition by Beth Hersant Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Good Neighbours edition by Beth Hersant Literature Fiction eBooks 
A tribe on the verge of starvation...
A threat from men’s oldest nightmares...
It’s time to pick a side.
Exploring the forgotten tales of our ancestors, Good Neighbours combines folklore, myth and theology to add a new dimension to the famous historical tales of Great Britain. Touching upon legend as well as facts, this is a comprehensive, fictionalised story that sheds light on how things came to be.
An epic journey through the ages...
Good Neighbours is a fantasy novel woven with the fascinating past of the British population, beginning at the Neolithic era in 7000 BC and spanning more than nine thousand years, to the modern day. The Iron Age, Saxon Invasion and the Normans are just a few of the wide array of topics covered in this unique novel.
Delving into the violent periods of British history, Good Neighbours has a depth of plot and character that will prove a compelling read for fans of both history and fantasy fiction. Inspired by authors such as Milan Kundera, Harper Lee and C. S. Lewis, it provides an action-packed account of both the famous and forgotten aspects of British history, including those that are often omitted from museum displays and conventional accounts. In doing so, it crafts a history of Britain unlike any other...
Good Neighbours edition by Beth Hersant Literature Fiction eBooks
[Full disclosure: I happen to be a friend of the author, which you can take or leave as you wish. However, Good Neighbours falls in a genre with which I am quite familiar and I am writing this review on my own account. Bonus: Q&A with the Author below!]I find that so much of the fantasy (and sci-fi) writing of the past 20 years is almost formulaic in its approach to plot, character development and storytelling. Worlds are created of nothing (some well, some not-so-well). Characters are introduced and strut their hour, (or hours, as the sequels drone on...), struggling against hypocrisy as if it were the same as evil. And for me, the stories begin to run together, their tone and timbre so much alike.
Good Neighbours is not like that. Mrs. Hersant is a scholar and teacher as much as a storyteller. She has set out not just to retell the major stories of the island that has become England, but to explore the themes and lessons that make the place. Stylistically, I can imagine this book being written alongside the Hobbit in the 1930s or even before the Great War. And I liked that a lot. As I settle in to my next page-turner, it seems quite pale.
As a counterpoint to the scholarly approach, Mrs. Hersant's vehicle is a compelling intertwining story. Her band of characters, both core and itinerant, are well rounded and complicated. Their actions and motivations help make simple myths into round stories and banal allegories into drama. There are no straw men or women, and she explores her characters motivations deeply. Their deliberations and decisions become the true drama of the stories. Only one character is truly evil, and he is well worth the read.
This book is not like all the others, and that's a good thing. Not only did I enjoy it, but I think it will return to me many times in the years to come.
***
I took the liberty of asking Beth a few questions, which she graciously answered. So here’s a quick Q&A with the author:
JV: You have undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. What was your primary area of study?
BH: Modern Fiction. I really enjoy literature from all periods, but focused on modern fiction because I knew that when I came to write, my first instinct would be to follow the tried and tested formulas. By focusing on newer material, it got me thinking along experimental lines and helped me develop an idea for a different approach to the novel. The classes, however, were not enough. The stuff I wrote when I was fresh out of college was really very bad. I've come to realise that writing is like singing. You can study and train all you want, but, in the end, you have to wait for your voice to mature to gain any real control over it. That's why the novel was finished in my 40s instead of my 20s. I needed to do a lot of growing up and a lot of living first.
JV: Are there any authors you particularly admire? Virginia Wolfe is quoted in one chapter, for instance.
BH: I did my Masters thesis on Virginia Woolf. There are many authors that I love -- Daphne Du Maurier and Jim Crace for their lyricism; Milan Kundera for his brilliance; C.S. Lewis for his compassion; Louise Erdrich for the spell-binding quality of her work; Harper Lee for her voice. I'll stop there but the list could go on and on.
JV: Your weaving of the tribe's storyline into a multitude of extant mythology is a real tour-de-force. It was fun to guess how the story would fit into each story (those with which I was familiar). Did you have any rules about how far you would bend or modify existing stories?
BH: The myths, legends and fairy tales guided the action of the novel. I tried to remain as true to them as possible. However, these stories don't delve into the psychology and emotions of their characters as deeply as I wanted to go. And so my rule was to remain true to the original texts, but where they stopped, I continued on. Take the character of Gwyn, for instance. There are quite a few stories about his exploits. They link him to Annwyn and the fairies; they portray him as a prosperous ruler; they lay blame for the wild hunt and Gwenhwyfar's rape squarely on his shoulders. From these facts I had to profile the character, to flesh him out and make him real. It would have been all too easy to simply portray him as a wicked man. Some of his actions were beyond vile. But to clap the proverbial black hat on his head and be done with it was too trite, a two-dimensional villain in what I hoped would be a three-dimensional story. Luckily, at the time I was reading Roy Baumeister's book, "Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty," and in it he illustrated how normal people can be led to commit terrible acts. With those ideas in mind, I fleshed Gwyn out, gave him reasonable attributes and common flaws and then put him under pressure. As the tragedies in his life mounted, he became more and more unhinged until he evolved into the monster of folklore. That mix between good and evil seemed more realistic to me and also added an interesting dynamic between him and his daughter, the narrator.
JV: Are there any stories you had to leave out?
BH: I cut quite a bit from the novel. My research into the history and folklore was so extensive that my first instinct was to include as much of it as possible. However, this proved to be self-indulgent. I began to realise that some of the content was there simply because I found it interesting and not because it added any real benefit to the story. And so I began to concentrate on the pace of the novel. The ideas had to be presented in a way that would sweep the reader along and move at a good clip. Anything that was tangential or interrupted the flow was cut. Quite often, I found myself muttering, "OK, time to be brutal" as I took a red pen to cross out whole pages of the book.
JV: What were the most difficult research details for you? (Chinese? Medicine? Chemistry/Alchemy?)
BH: The hardest part of the research was my little foray into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. It took real effort to digest all of that information and my grip on it remains tenuous. That is why I am now such a huge fan of Steven Pinker and Jonah Lehrer. They are both amazingly knowledgable in these fields and yet their books are very accessible and well written.
JV: Good Neighbours. How did you choose the title?
BH: "Good Neighbours" was one of the euphemisms used for the fairy folk -- it was designed to flatter them and, along with offerings of food and milk, to keep them from making mischief. They were called by other names, such as the "good folk." I chose Good Neighbours as my title not only because it referred to the tribe, but also because it underscored, in an ironic way, the difficulty that different groups had in peacefully coexisting near each other. We see it again and again throughout the novel, the "us versus them" conflict played out brutally among the various factions. I left it for the narrator to discover that at some point the tit-for-tat fighting had to stop.
JV: Do you draft longhand or with keyboard? Mac or PC? What software do you use?
BH: I first tried typing the draft on my PC (Microsoft Word). But found that I really couldn't settle to the task. And so I started writing it all out long-hand. At one point I managed to overcome writer’s block and write page after page like a woman possessed. I had randomly grabbed a pen with purple ink that day and soon developed a superstitious admiration for the purple pen. It was a bit like a basketball player who needs to wear his lucky socks for a game. The rest of the novel was written with that pen. I'd write a chapter at a time, then type it up and box it while I collected my thoughts for the next chapter. I bought a bunch of cheap notebooks, one for each chapter, that I called "Playbooks" (again continuing the sports analogy). In them, I charted the path the next chapter would take and made sure that I had all of the information that I needed. This helped me identify gaps in my research that I needed to fill and it also forced me to stop and consider the themes of the novel and make sure that they resonated through the next section. Once the playbook was completed, I'd set it aside to mull over while I went back to proofread and edit the last chapter that I'd boxed.
JV: The book’s cover is a wonderful texture; it’s hard to describe, but delightful to hold. What is it? (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend holding the book at a bookstore or buying the paper copy. Very cool.)
BH: Honestly, I don't know. I am very new to publishing and so had to be taken by the hand and lead through the process. There were a few things about the cover that I knew I definitely did not want (having seen them used on other books) and so my publisher came up with the cover you now have.
JV: It's rare for fiction to have footnotes, but I liked it. I would also be interested in a list of the myths and stories you retell, perhaps with suggestions for good editions?
BH: All of the sources that I used are listed in the footnotes. The fairytales are the standard ones, derived from Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault. The myths and legends come from a host of books on the subject, as well as from the internet. If I were to recommend any books from my research they would be:
Animals in Translation: the Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.
The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge.
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker.
The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up its Mind, by Jonah Lehrer.
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, by Roy Baumeister.
These books are absolutely brilliant. Frankly, I wish that I'd been smart enough to write them. They are insightful, wise and contained, for me, some fairly earth-shattering ideas.
JV: Did you do any reading while writing? Any guilty pleasures? What's on your list now?
BH: When I wasn't reading around the topic and doing research, I would invariably pick a book that had nothing to do with the novel. This just helped me switch my brain off at the end of the day. My guilty pleasure? Mark Tufo's Zombie Fallout Series. That man has a brilliant sense of humour!
JV: Is the deconstruction of the six-pointed star into the four elements your invention?
BH: No, the symbolism found within the Star of David that links it to the elements can be found on the internet on various occult websites that deal with religious symbolism. It was just something that I stumbled on that fit in nicely with the action in the novel.
JV: For the first half of the book, I 'heard' the A Side Note passages as the author's voice, not the narrator’s.
BH: I noticed the same thing while I was writing it and pondered for a long time what to do about the narrative voice of the novel. In the end, I decided to leave it that way. The narrator and the "author" are one and the same person. Yes, I wrote the book. But it is her story and within the confines of the novel she is the only one in any position to tell it. Hence, I approached the narration from the perspective of her writing about her life. As the novel progresses, the narrative voice begins to take on a more familiar tone as she warms to her subject. In fact, the narrator as a character is slowly drawn out -- more and more is revealed about her. However, she belonged to a group that survived for millennia by going to ground and concealing themselves. Hence, there is a tension in the novel between what she must reveal to tell her story and what she feels the need to withhold (her real name, for instance).
JV: Did you include any people you know as characters? I spotted many themes from your personal life. Those parts were very heartfelt, honest and open.
BH: No. The "I" in the book is not me. Her life and her relationships are not mine. In fact the action of the novel was dictated by history and events taken from folklore, myth and legend. The main characters were derived from the same sources. The difficulty with writing about mythological or historical figures is that we often don't get a real good look at them. We know what they did and the big events they were involved in, but what the man was like to talk to, his habits, his mannerisms, and his hangups are often lost in time. And so what I had to do was to read up on each character (no matter how obscure) and, from the details on record, I then had to profile the man. It was like that with all of the main characters. Glean what I could about them from history and/or folklore. Profile them and then extrapolate from that how they would behave in the situations of the novel.
On my desk, I have a funny little tin sign that reads: "Be careful or you'll end up in my novel." But I was never tempted to do that. No one I know formed the basis for the characters. They were wretchedly or gloriously themselves.
Having said that, I'm not absent from the book. The characters are fictional, the events historical, but the feelings and questions are mine. That is how it must be. It is, I think, the only way to make fiction credible. You can make up all the stuff you want as long as it has an emotional truth. When I write about grief or rage or isolation, I can only write about those things as I understand them, as I've experienced them. And so writing fiction offers an uncomfortably intimate look at me as the author -- not of my life details, but of who I really am.
There are also little personal touches. In Chapter 6 I needed a lullaby. Initially, I found a lullaby (recently written, I think), but of Celtic origin. And then I remembered: Copyright law. Copyright law is a notoriously woolly subject. You can quote other authors as long as, generally, you limit the number of words quoted from any given source and give full credit. Except when it comes to poetry or songs. If you want to quote them the poet or composer had better be very long dead or the cleated boot of copyright law will stomp on you. Long story short, I needed another lullaby. And then I remembered one that I had written for my daughter when she was very young. And so I decided to keep that tune in my head while I wrote lyrics that suited the novel. I said before that I can only write about grief and rage as I know them. The same goes for love....
As a final note, I just wanted to say thank you to JV for the review and for this opportunity to talk about the book. It really means a lot. I would also like to thank prospective readers for their time and consideration. Publishing is a competitive business with thousands of new books vying for shelf-space every year. Therefore I am grateful to anyone who is willing to consider reading my work. If you have any questions about the novel, you can contact me on Facebook, Twitter, or on my website: www.bethhersant.co.uk. And if you chose to purchase "Good Neighbours" then thank you -- you have seriously made my day! I really hope you enjoy it.
Best Wishes,
Beth
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Good Neighbours edition by Beth Hersant Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I enjoyed this book right from the very beginning until the very end. It is epic in scope and scale. It is the story of Britain from the point of view of the youngest member of an ancient tribe called the Coranieid.
The attention to detail is amazing. It is clear that Beth Hersant has put a huge amount of work into this and it really pays off. I was enthralled by the life and inner workings of the tribe right from the start and the main characters have wonderful depth to them.
The intertwining of myths, legends and historical fact is breathtakingly and left me wanting to hear more every time. The story stretches across pre-Celt Britain all the way to the modern day. I was engrossed by every facet and especially enjoyed the War with the Celts, the alliance with King Arthur and the story of St. George.
Morality also plays a key role throughout the story and the raw emotion within it at times really jumps off the page.
I have no idea how Beth Hersant can follow this up, but I wait with baited breath to find out. This book is truly excellent.
Brilliantly clever fictional history of England. Wonderfully spun story, filled with historical facts, legend, and fantasy. Loved it!
[Full disclosure I happen to be a friend of the author, which you can take or leave as you wish. However, Good Neighbours falls in a genre with which I am quite familiar and I am writing this review on my own account. Bonus Q&A with the Author below!]
I find that so much of the fantasy (and sci-fi) writing of the past 20 years is almost formulaic in its approach to plot, character development and storytelling. Worlds are created of nothing (some well, some not-so-well). Characters are introduced and strut their hour, (or hours, as the sequels drone on...), struggling against hypocrisy as if it were the same as evil. And for me, the stories begin to run together, their tone and timbre so much alike.
Good Neighbours is not like that. Mrs. Hersant is a scholar and teacher as much as a storyteller. She has set out not just to retell the major stories of the island that has become England, but to explore the themes and lessons that make the place. Stylistically, I can imagine this book being written alongside the Hobbit in the 1930s or even before the Great War. And I liked that a lot. As I settle in to my next page-turner, it seems quite pale.
As a counterpoint to the scholarly approach, Mrs. Hersant's vehicle is a compelling intertwining story. Her band of characters, both core and itinerant, are well rounded and complicated. Their actions and motivations help make simple myths into round stories and banal allegories into drama. There are no straw men or women, and she explores her characters motivations deeply. Their deliberations and decisions become the true drama of the stories. Only one character is truly evil, and he is well worth the read.
This book is not like all the others, and that's a good thing. Not only did I enjoy it, but I think it will return to me many times in the years to come.
***
I took the liberty of asking Beth a few questions, which she graciously answered. So here’s a quick Q&A with the author
JV You have undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. What was your primary area of study?
BH Modern Fiction. I really enjoy literature from all periods, but focused on modern fiction because I knew that when I came to write, my first instinct would be to follow the tried and tested formulas. By focusing on newer material, it got me thinking along experimental lines and helped me develop an idea for a different approach to the novel. The classes, however, were not enough. The stuff I wrote when I was fresh out of college was really very bad. I've come to realise that writing is like singing. You can study and train all you want, but, in the end, you have to wait for your voice to mature to gain any real control over it. That's why the novel was finished in my 40s instead of my 20s. I needed to do a lot of growing up and a lot of living first.
JV Are there any authors you particularly admire? Virginia Wolfe is quoted in one chapter, for instance.
BH I did my Masters thesis on Virginia Woolf. There are many authors that I love -- Daphne Du Maurier and Jim Crace for their lyricism; Milan Kundera for his brilliance; C.S. Lewis for his compassion; Louise Erdrich for the spell-binding quality of her work; Harper Lee for her voice. I'll stop there but the list could go on and on.
JV Your weaving of the tribe's storyline into a multitude of extant mythology is a real tour-de-force. It was fun to guess how the story would fit into each story (those with which I was familiar). Did you have any rules about how far you would bend or modify existing stories?
BH The myths, legends and fairy tales guided the action of the novel. I tried to remain as true to them as possible. However, these stories don't delve into the psychology and emotions of their characters as deeply as I wanted to go. And so my rule was to remain true to the original texts, but where they stopped, I continued on. Take the character of Gwyn, for instance. There are quite a few stories about his exploits. They link him to Annwyn and the fairies; they portray him as a prosperous ruler; they lay blame for the wild hunt and Gwenhwyfar's rape squarely on his shoulders. From these facts I had to profile the character, to flesh him out and make him real. It would have been all too easy to simply portray him as a wicked man. Some of his actions were beyond vile. But to clap the proverbial black hat on his head and be done with it was too trite, a two-dimensional villain in what I hoped would be a three-dimensional story. Luckily, at the time I was reading Roy Baumeister's book, "Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty," and in it he illustrated how normal people can be led to commit terrible acts. With those ideas in mind, I fleshed Gwyn out, gave him reasonable attributes and common flaws and then put him under pressure. As the tragedies in his life mounted, he became more and more unhinged until he evolved into the monster of folklore. That mix between good and evil seemed more realistic to me and also added an interesting dynamic between him and his daughter, the narrator.
JV Are there any stories you had to leave out?
BH I cut quite a bit from the novel. My research into the history and folklore was so extensive that my first instinct was to include as much of it as possible. However, this proved to be self-indulgent. I began to realise that some of the content was there simply because I found it interesting and not because it added any real benefit to the story. And so I began to concentrate on the pace of the novel. The ideas had to be presented in a way that would sweep the reader along and move at a good clip. Anything that was tangential or interrupted the flow was cut. Quite often, I found myself muttering, "OK, time to be brutal" as I took a red pen to cross out whole pages of the book.
JV What were the most difficult research details for you? (Chinese? Medicine? Chemistry/Alchemy?)
BH The hardest part of the research was my little foray into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. It took real effort to digest all of that information and my grip on it remains tenuous. That is why I am now such a huge fan of Steven Pinker and Jonah Lehrer. They are both amazingly knowledgable in these fields and yet their books are very accessible and well written.
JV Good Neighbours. How did you choose the title?
BH "Good Neighbours" was one of the euphemisms used for the fairy folk -- it was designed to flatter them and, along with offerings of food and milk, to keep them from making mischief. They were called by other names, such as the "good folk." I chose Good Neighbours as my title not only because it referred to the tribe, but also because it underscored, in an ironic way, the difficulty that different groups had in peacefully coexisting near each other. We see it again and again throughout the novel, the "us versus them" conflict played out brutally among the various factions. I left it for the narrator to discover that at some point the tit-for-tat fighting had to stop.
JV Do you draft longhand or with keyboard? Mac or PC? What software do you use?
BH I first tried typing the draft on my PC (Microsoft Word). But found that I really couldn't settle to the task. And so I started writing it all out long-hand. At one point I managed to overcome writer’s block and write page after page like a woman possessed. I had randomly grabbed a pen with purple ink that day and soon developed a superstitious admiration for the purple pen. It was a bit like a basketball player who needs to wear his lucky socks for a game. The rest of the novel was written with that pen. I'd write a chapter at a time, then type it up and box it while I collected my thoughts for the next chapter. I bought a bunch of cheap notebooks, one for each chapter, that I called "Playbooks" (again continuing the sports analogy). In them, I charted the path the next chapter would take and made sure that I had all of the information that I needed. This helped me identify gaps in my research that I needed to fill and it also forced me to stop and consider the themes of the novel and make sure that they resonated through the next section. Once the playbook was completed, I'd set it aside to mull over while I went back to proofread and edit the last chapter that I'd boxed.
JV The book’s cover is a wonderful texture; it’s hard to describe, but delightful to hold. What is it? (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend holding the book at a bookstore or buying the paper copy. Very cool.)
BH Honestly, I don't know. I am very new to publishing and so had to be taken by the hand and lead through the process. There were a few things about the cover that I knew I definitely did not want (having seen them used on other books) and so my publisher came up with the cover you now have.
JV It's rare for fiction to have footnotes, but I liked it. I would also be interested in a list of the myths and stories you retell, perhaps with suggestions for good editions?
BH All of the sources that I used are listed in the footnotes. The fairytales are the standard ones, derived from Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault. The myths and legends come from a host of books on the subject, as well as from the internet. If I were to recommend any books from my research they would be
Animals in Translation the Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson.
The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge.
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker.
The Decisive Moment How the Brain Makes Up its Mind, by Jonah Lehrer.
Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, by Roy Baumeister.
These books are absolutely brilliant. Frankly, I wish that I'd been smart enough to write them. They are insightful, wise and contained, for me, some fairly earth-shattering ideas.
JV Did you do any reading while writing? Any guilty pleasures? What's on your list now?
BH When I wasn't reading around the topic and doing research, I would invariably pick a book that had nothing to do with the novel. This just helped me switch my brain off at the end of the day. My guilty pleasure? Mark Tufo's Zombie Fallout Series. That man has a brilliant sense of humour!
JV Is the deconstruction of the six-pointed star into the four elements your invention?
BH No, the symbolism found within the Star of David that links it to the elements can be found on the internet on various occult websites that deal with religious symbolism. It was just something that I stumbled on that fit in nicely with the action in the novel.
JV For the first half of the book, I 'heard' the A Side Note passages as the author's voice, not the narrator’s.
BH I noticed the same thing while I was writing it and pondered for a long time what to do about the narrative voice of the novel. In the end, I decided to leave it that way. The narrator and the "author" are one and the same person. Yes, I wrote the book. But it is her story and within the confines of the novel she is the only one in any position to tell it. Hence, I approached the narration from the perspective of her writing about her life. As the novel progresses, the narrative voice begins to take on a more familiar tone as she warms to her subject. In fact, the narrator as a character is slowly drawn out -- more and more is revealed about her. However, she belonged to a group that survived for millennia by going to ground and concealing themselves. Hence, there is a tension in the novel between what she must reveal to tell her story and what she feels the need to withhold (her real name, for instance).
JV Did you include any people you know as characters? I spotted many themes from your personal life. Those parts were very heartfelt, honest and open.
BH No. The "I" in the book is not me. Her life and her relationships are not mine. In fact the action of the novel was dictated by history and events taken from folklore, myth and legend. The main characters were derived from the same sources. The difficulty with writing about mythological or historical figures is that we often don't get a real good look at them. We know what they did and the big events they were involved in, but what the man was like to talk to, his habits, his mannerisms, and his hangups are often lost in time. And so what I had to do was to read up on each character (no matter how obscure) and, from the details on record, I then had to profile the man. It was like that with all of the main characters. Glean what I could about them from history and/or folklore. Profile them and then extrapolate from that how they would behave in the situations of the novel.
On my desk, I have a funny little tin sign that reads "Be careful or you'll end up in my novel." But I was never tempted to do that. No one I know formed the basis for the characters. They were wretchedly or gloriously themselves.
Having said that, I'm not absent from the book. The characters are fictional, the events historical, but the feelings and questions are mine. That is how it must be. It is, I think, the only way to make fiction credible. You can make up all the stuff you want as long as it has an emotional truth. When I write about grief or rage or isolation, I can only write about those things as I understand them, as I've experienced them. And so writing fiction offers an uncomfortably intimate look at me as the author -- not of my life details, but of who I really am.
There are also little personal touches. In Chapter 6 I needed a lullaby. Initially, I found a lullaby (recently written, I think), but of Celtic origin. And then I remembered Copyright law. Copyright law is a notoriously woolly subject. You can quote other authors as long as, generally, you limit the number of words quoted from any given source and give full credit. Except when it comes to poetry or songs. If you want to quote them the poet or composer had better be very long dead or the cleated boot of copyright law will stomp on you. Long story short, I needed another lullaby. And then I remembered one that I had written for my daughter when she was very young. And so I decided to keep that tune in my head while I wrote lyrics that suited the novel. I said before that I can only write about grief and rage as I know them. The same goes for love....
As a final note, I just wanted to say thank you to JV for the review and for this opportunity to talk about the book. It really means a lot. I would also like to thank prospective readers for their time and consideration. Publishing is a competitive business with thousands of new books vying for shelf-space every year. Therefore I am grateful to anyone who is willing to consider reading my work. If you have any questions about the novel, you can contact me on Facebook, Twitter, or on my website www.bethhersant.co.uk. And if you chose to purchase "Good Neighbours" then thank you -- you have seriously made my day! I really hope you enjoy it.
Best Wishes,
Beth
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