Category: Women Publisher: Creativia
ISBN-10: 1533641668
Type: Fiction
Pages: 202
Copyright: May 23 2016
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Women's fiction focusing on family relationships and sibling rivalry.
When you meet the love of your life, the last thing you expect is your sister luring him away.
Clare faces this scenario when her sister, Isabel, marries singer and guitarist Ross Tyler. To make things even worse, Ross hits the big time, makes a fortune and moves to France with his family.
But when tragedy strikes, Ross and Clare are forced to revisit their common past, one which they must try to put behind them for Isabel's sake.
Excerpt
Life as I know it is definitely starting to be a bit of a drag, due to the fact that I’ve been awake now for 3 days and nights on Desolation Hill. I am finished, kaput. Thank God it’s the last day, that’s all I can say.
I yawn for the umpteenth time and watch in a kind of stupor as the fences are torn down. Ruth jumps up excitedly and decides that she wants to try and get nearer the stage. I watch her treading unconcerned over zombie-like bodies lying comatose and frying in the heat of the late August afternoon, and try to summon up enough strength to follow her. But by then, hungrier and more tired than I have ever been, I am faced with the certainty that all I really want to do is to go home. Bands have started to merge one into the other, but I know I’ll have to face a ribbing from Ruth if I set off without first having tried to get nearer the stage if only to feast one weary eye on the hunk of masculinity that is Paul Rogers while there is still some good daylight left.
I force my body to move, performing a quick recce around what has transformed in three days from arable farmland into a nuclear fallout zone contained in some kind of human landfill site. I cannot see Ruth, but I stumble on regardless. Somewhere out there my friend has become lost in a sea of 500,000 faces; just another flower-bedecked hippie indistinguishable from the masses.
Far away on the horizon I can see a speck holding a microphone stand up above his head; Paul Rogers is holding the crowd in the palm of his hand, and I am missing it. Behind him on the low stage, long hair flying in the sultry air, Paul Kossoff, six string shredder extraordinaire, is ripping into the solo for ‘All Right Now.’
I cannot make my legs walk another step. I yawn. Infuriatingly I still seem to be on Desolation Hill as far as I can make out. Sighing with fatigue, I slump down on the grass where I stand, close my eyes, and listen to the hubbub around me. My long hair feels like a heavy blanket on my back; I desperately want something to eat, I need a bath, and I ache for my mum to be fussing around me like she does when I am sick.
“Hey babe, have some of this.”
I am startled by a voice very close to my ear. I open my eyes again and look to my left to see what only can be described as a bronzed, blond Adonis, with long fair curls stretching down over his shoulders. He is stripped to the waist apart from a small rucksack on his back, and wears frayed pale-blue Levi shorts and a pair of well-worn ‘Jesus creeper’ sandals.
Professional Reviews
The Donor grabs you from the opening line!
In "THE DONOR", Ms. Turner has crafted a novel with characters so well developed, you instantly visualize their physical appearances and through her real descriptions of their personalities, through "their" thoughts and words, you feel you KNOW them as living human beings. I found her writing style to be very unique. I have been a voracious reader for over sixty years and must confess I have never read any book that is outside the traditional "first persone" or "third person" point of view. I was immediately quite impressed that Ms. Turner has written "THE DONOR" with each character's individual point of view. I am amzaed at how Ms. Turner deftly switched between her characters to pen a very touching novel. "THE DONOR" opens in 1970 with the end of a three day Band Festival, sort of a British version of America's infamous "Woodstock" of 1969. The reader is introduced to "Claire Ronson", who at almost 19 had secreted away three days earlier with her best friend Ruth to attend the festival, unbeknownst to her father Donald and mother Marian. Her father, a doctor and her mother, a nurse are upper-middle class and devoted to Claire and her older sister, Isabel ("Izzy"), At the end of the festival, having been awake for three days and nights, she has her food stolen, and she is penniless. We then meet "Ross Tyler", a blond adonis, her "Knight in Shining Armor". He provides her with an apple. He wraps a protective arm around her and offers to take her to the Ferry Station and assure her safe passage home. They spend several hours together, hitching a ride with a farmer to the Ferry boat station. Claire instantly falls in love with Ross and is positive he will be her "soul mate". Ross invites her to a local Pub, where he and his band will be performing the following Saturday night. She agrees. She knows, however that her father will never approve of Ross, an art student and guitar player /singer in a rock band.. Once home, she finds her sister Izzy is home from the University, where she is a medical student. She tells Izzy all about the festival and her meeting Ross. She learns from Izzy that she has broken off her relationship with her long-time boyfriend, Jeff. She invites Izzy to the pub to meet Ross and watch the band's performance. Izzy accepts and they tell their parents they are going to visit her friend Ruth. Events unfold from there, taking the reader through the next three decades with many twists and turns, incidents unfold which tears the family apart. The reader is gripped as each character describes the incidents through their individual point of view. The ending will blow your mind! "THE DONOR" is a love story that has all of the characters intertwined. Reading how each character views the evolving events in "real time" through the years is unique and makes "THE DONOR" one of the very BEST novels I have read in the last eighteen months. I LOVED it! By Michael Phelps.
The final heartbreaking chapters moved me from disbelief to tears, some of joy and some of sadness.
This was a book I could not put down and I read it in 3 hours.
The characters were profoundly flawed and that only added to the realism of the story, the relationships between them all are bittersweet yet heartwarming.
It's a story of one family who suffer because of one betrayal then as the story progresses you find that there was more betrayal that has happened in the past, it was so well written that I could see myself being one or another of the characters and put myself In their shoes at time I found myself rooting for one character then in the next chapter I was rooting for another and wishing I could grab the and shake them and tell them not to be so prideful and explain to them all they would loose out on.
In the second half of the story the main two characters find themselves reunited in the darkest of circumstance and they have to find a way to get through it all together and that leaves them both reeling! The final heartbreaking chapters moved me from disbelief to tears some of joy some of sadness, and it's a credit to the author that she was able to convey these emotions with the telling of this fabulous story. By Julz Gall.
