I’m on tour today for Alison McQueen’s newly-released Under the Jeweled Sky, with a guest post from Alison on her family heritage’s influence on the setting of the novel – in India.
About Alison McQueen:
Born to an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, Alison McQueen grew up in London. After a convent education, Alison worked in advertising for 25 years before retiring to write full time.
In 2006 she was selected from an impressive long list to join The Writer’s Circle, a group of 8 top writers to be groomed by the UK film industry as the new generation of British screenwriters. She has written seven novels, including Under the Jeweled Sky and The Secret Children, which was inspired by her life.
Connect with Alison online at her website & blog www.alisonmcqueen.com, and on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
About Under the Jeweled Sky:
Sophie Schofield always knew she would return to India. When she does in 1957, she is the new bride of ambitious British diplomat Lucien Granger and part of the glittering expatriate set that called New Delhi home following India’s partition.
But it’s not the country she fell in love with 10 years earlier and Sophie is soon confronted with the memory of her first love and its devastating consequences. The past still haunts her – the guilt she carries, the destruction wreaked upon her fragile parents, and the boy with the tourmaline eyes.
Title: Under the Jeweled Sky
Author: Alison McQueen
ISBN-13: 9781402288760
Publisher: Sourcebooks, 2014
Purchase at IndieBound, Amazon, The Book Depository
I was supposed to review Under the Jeweled Sky for this tour, unfortunately I’m late on that. It’ll post in the next few days.
from Alison McQueen:
I was born in London during the swinging sixties when mixed marriages were still a rarity. My mother was born in Assam in 1928. She came to England thirty years later, never meaning to stay, and met my father, a strapping great Viking of a man
Ours was a strange family without extension. I knew that I had a grandfather and that he had a farm in Africa, but I never met him. He existed only as a single photograph in my mother’s album.
My father was effectively an orphan, abandoned to a Barnardo’s home at the age of five.
With so little information about who I was and where my family came from, it’s little wonder I became a writer. I am the product of two mismatched people from wildly different cultures.
I didn’t visit India until I was in my late thirties. My mother had gone occasionally with her Indian friends, but she had never suggested taking any of us with her. I heard hear declare once that none of her children had any interest in visiting India. She couldn’t have been more wrong. I told her that I had been waiting a very long time for her to introduce me to the other half of my heritage. A small argument ensued and we got on a plane.
It was as though I had finally found the part of me that had always been missing. We went every year for the next decade, travelling around India together while my mother told me everything. I shall always cherish the memory of the two of us sitting out in the wilds of the jungle late at night listening to the song of the nighttime, holding hands.
Part of Under The Jeweled Sky is set in a maharaja’s palace in 1947. Although the fictional palace and its location are anonymous, I did have an inside track into life in an Indian palace. In her twenties, my mother was hired as the private nurse to the Maharaja of Indore’s mother-in-law. She arrived from Bombay and was shown to her quarters, an enormous suite in a grand building set across the grounds from the main palace.
A car was sent for her every morning, but she said that she preferred to walk. So off she would go, strolling through the grounds while the car followed along a few yards behind, driving at snail’s pace in case she should change her mind. Her breakfast would be served to her on a solid silver service, with a footman standing by should she want for anything.
From what she has told me, I am not sure that she handled it particularly well. She said that she didn’t want any fuss, which was quite the wrong way to go about things in a palace. There was also an incident when she was caught preparing her own boiled egg, which didn’t go down at all well. The cook was quite overcome with grief, and my mother never ventured to lift a finger again.
Alison, I’m so sorry I haven’t finished Under the Jeweled Sky – it’s a lovely book so far! Thank you for guest posting today.
The post Blog Tour: Alison McQueen and Under the Jeweled Sky! appeared first on drey's library.