THE WIDOW'S PROMISE Paperback – 25 January 2018

I have been writing for as long as I can remember - my first readers were my classmates at Grammar School, for whom I wrote long serials on exercise book paper until I was caught writing under the desk in chemistry! I was sure I would be expelled, but after reading my whole file of stories, all my teacher said was: 'Well, if you wrote these all by yourself, when you get your first book published, don't forget your old chemistry master and send him a copy!' I first became a professional writing short stories and serials for women's magazines in the late '60s and spent ten enjoyable years at this. I then published my first novel THE BLACK MOUNTAINS under my own name, Janet Tanner. This was a family saga set in the Somerset coalfields, where I was born and brought up, and where I once again live, in a fictional mining town called Hillsbridge. There were eventually four Hillsbridge books, which have recently been reissued, along with many of my other Janet Tanner titles, as e-books and print-on-demand by Macmillan Bello. Besides writing many more books under my own name I have been Amelia Carr - DANCE WITH WINGS was the first of four multi-generational sagas, set partly in the past and partly in the present day. Now, to my great delight, I am once again writing family sagas set in the Somerset Coalfield, the first of which is ALL THE DARK SECRETS. THE MINER'S DAUGHTER came out in hardback and as an e-book in October and will be published in paperback in January. I have just finished a third book in this series - I'll let you know what it is to be called when a decision has been made! These books tell the stories of families affected by a terrible disaster at a local pit, and the inspiration for this came from a real life tragedy when twelve men and boys lost their lives at a local colliery when the rope lowering them into the depths of the earth was severed, sending them crashing down. And the awful suspicion was that this was no accident, though in real life this was never proved and the culprit was never caught. Interesting I have recently received a letter from a lady in Australia who is a descendant of one of the men who lost their lives that terrible day! Sadly I lost my husband of almost fifty years in 2013, but I am blessed with a wonderful family, two lovely daughters and four beautiful grandchildren aged between 17 and 9.