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Interview with Sandra-Jane Goddard, author of An Unorthodox Arrangement

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‘An Unorthodox Arrangement’ is a story about second chances.  It’s the tale of what happens when a young woman, resigned to life in an unfulfilling marriage, comes face to face once again with the lover with whom she previously gave up the chance to elope.

We’ve talked to you previously about The Worst of Lies. This is a sequel, right?
It meets up with the Strong family ten years after the end of The Worst of Lies.  As you might expect, in the intervening years, the shape of the family has changed but the dynamics between the members haven’t, so readers of The Worst of Lies will find most of their favourite characters still nicely entangled but will also become acquainted with a couple of intriguing new ones, too.

[For anyone who has not yet read The Worst of Lies, here is a summary from our interview about it:

Set in Hampshire, England in 1829, it follows what happens when seventeen-year old Mary Springer marries George Strong and arrives with him at Summerleas Farm, unaware that he is still obsessed with his erstwhile lover, Annie, the woman now married to his brother. Also unbeknown to her is the fact that resentful of George’s marriage and unhappy in her own, Annie is scheming to rekindle her relationship with him.

Read the interview here.]

What genre is An Unorthodox Arrangement?
It’s the second book in a family saga but since it is set in 1842, it is also historical with strong elements of romance, too.

What kind of readers will it appeal to?
Hopefully people who enjoyed The Worst of Lies will want to know how the story goes on to develop but feedback from readers tells me that this book still makes sense even if you’re not reading it as a sequel.  Just possibly, though, if the outline of this story appeals to you, then you’ll want to go back and read the first book first!

Complete this sentence for us: if you like _________________, you’ll love An Unorthodox Arrangement.
Not to blow my own trumpet here but if you enjoyed The Worst of Lies, you’re very definitely going to want to read this and find out what happens next.

As a series, though, The Strongs of Summerleas Farm is aimed at readers who want to immerse themselves in a bygone world, bond with characters despite their flaws and who like tangled relationships that draw out the best and the worst in our natures.

How would you like the reader to feel as they read the last word of this book?
This time around, since the storyline isn’t left quite as open as it was in the first book, I’d like the reader to feel a sense of satisfaction but also a tinge of disappointment that it’s over.

Where’s the series going next?
I’ve always believed that the Strongs of Summerleas Farm have more stories to tell but even in the very early days of developing the character of Annie, I sensed that she was concealing an interesting past, so much so in fact that before I finished either of the first two novels, I spent a lot of time fleshing out her back-story.  Indeed, readers with a keen eye will already have spotted a couple of references to her life before she arrived at Summerleas.  And so when you reach the end of An Unorthodox Arrangement, I recommend signing-up to be notified of when Annie’s own tale, The Dairymaid, is released.  But then I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?

We know we’ve asked you this before, but tell us about yourself again, if you don’t mind.
I was born and raised in quietest Hampshire in southern England, which is why I have such a love of the countryside but for a very long time now, I have also been researching my ancestry, which is actually what sowed the very first seeds for this series of books.

Do you have a website where we can keep up with your work?
You can find out more about me, my writing and my books
at https://sites.google.com/site/sandrajanegoddard/.

How can we follow you on Twitter and/or Facebook?
I’m on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AnUnorthodoxArrangement

And you can follow me on twitter at @anunorthodox.

What’s next?
Well, I’ve already mentioned The Dairymaid, which is now quite close to release and as I said, in terms of The Strongs of Summerleas Farm, I do have some ideas for following the family’s exploits further but entirely separately, I’m also writing a novel with the working title ‘Pernicious Habits’.  Set in Singapore in the 1880s and told from a first-person viewpoint, it’s very, very different from anything I have written before, although I do still have my genealogical research to thank for the basic idea.  It’s about a young woman, whose upbringing by a Balinese mother and Western father have left her with muddled beliefs about the roles of fate and destiny in her life and it is partly this confusion that sends her to the island in search of what she believes to be her future.  Needless to say, what she finds when she gets there, isn’t what she had been expecting…

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