Historical fiction - war, fashion, mystery and adventure - bringing the past to life in page-turning style
Kay Blythe, who also writes as Natalie Meg Evans, is an award-winning historical author on both sides of the Atlantic, having reached the New York Times top 100 list with her debut novel, The Dress Thief.
In the novels she calls her 'wartime epics', Natalie Meg sets out to grip her readers by creating memorable characters who survive, love and follow their dreams in the most testing circumstances. Always meticulously researched, these stories will take you into places and human experiences less known and less explored.
Writing crime as Kay Blythe fulfils a long-held ambition. Her dressmaker-sleuth, Jemima Flowerday, follows in the tradition of clever women set free by the social upheaval of the years after the First World War. Jemima combines her skills as a dressmaker and sleuth to solve crime in the crumbling stately homes of Britain. Expect fun and twists in the time-honoured style of this wonderful genre.
A reader says:
"I’ve never written anyone a fan letter before, but I just finished reading all of your books in a row & loved them so much that I just wanted to send you a note to say so. I love the characters & the world that you created. "
A family heirloom, a wartime secret kept for a generation ...
Paris, 1940 ...
Clutching a delicate silver dove-shaped brooch - the last gift from her beloved Otto with a message of love engraved on the back - Lally flees her home in Paris. With her closest friend by her side, she dodges the Nazi gunfire echoing all around.As they become more and more desperate during the darkest days in Europe, one must make a terrible sacrfice for them both to survive.
France 2014. After her father's death, grieving Hope starts a new life in southwest France. All she knows of her father's family is that they were separated in the second World War. Her only inheritance is a unique, dove-shaped brooch.
Will Hope's discoveries change everything she ever believed about her father? And even if she does find the truth, will it bring her healing - or tear her apart?
Writers write, readers read and some do both ...
Kay/Natalie caught the author bug very young - age four in fact. She wrote and wrote, never making it past the rejection-letter stage until, in 2012, she won the coveted Harry Bowling Prize with the novel that was to become The Dress Thief. The prize gave her an agent and a publisher and ten years on, she is now the proud author of eleven novels, with seven more novels commissioned. It's mind-blowing, occasionally scary and it makes her wish she could tap that disheartened younger her on the shoulder and say, 'You'll make it'. Natalie/Kay loves to teach writing and her motto to any unpublished author is 'Honour your voice and send your words out into the world. Rejection is tough, but it is never the end of the dream."
The Dress Thief by Natalie Meg Evans
Alix Gower has a dream, to join the ranks of Coco Chanel and become a designer in the high-stakes world of French fashion.
But Alix also has a secret; she supports her beloved grandmother by stealing designs for the foreign market. A hidden sketchbook and a moment inside a Paris salon is all she needs to create a perfect replica to be whisked off into production in New York.
Alix gets her big break, a chance to work in one of the most prominent Parisian fashion houses, but at a price. All it takes is one moment of misplaced trust for her life to start falling apart at the seams.
The Locket by Natalie Meg Evans
When farmer's daughter Irene meets Theo at a village dance, sparks fly instantly. The war has brought Theo all the way from Louisiana to build a US airbase just across her father's fields. As they sway together, there is nothing else in the world that matters.
But being together comes at a price as Theo is Black and the might of the US Air Force is against them. Authority and the small community in which she lives will go to terrible lengths to tear them apart.
Decades later, heartbroken Ruby is back at her family's crumbling farmhouse after the loss of her grandmother Irene. When Ruby uncovers a box of waterlogged diaries and discovers an untold story - and the existance of a precious locket - she realises she is unravelling a heartbreaking secret that changed her grandmother's life.
Murder at Merry Beggars Hall by Kay Blythe
When you read your first Agatha Christie novel aged twelve, you are drawn into a world of shadows, plot twists and the shock of murder wrapped up in a clever riddle.
To recreate it for yourself becomes irresistible.
Merry Beggars Hall in Suffolk (and yes, the lack of apostrophe is intended!) a gruesome discovery is made in the walled garden. The local police and even the bigwigs of Scotland Yard are baffled and it falls to an amateur sleuth, a 'mere dressmaker' , to unravel the crime.
In Jemima Flowerday, I have created a sleuth who breaks the social rules while looking at life with a lightly-sardonic eye. Making clothes for the women who call her into their grand homes, she enjoys the new freedom for women in the 1920s, while conveniently sliding into the background. A former shopgirl married to an aristocrat, Jemima can bridge the Upstairs/Downstairs divide, chatting with the posh while taking tea with their staff.
Jemima will appear in a series of murder mysteries, honing her investigatory skills as she gains a reputation for solving the stickiest of crimes.
The House by the Stones by Natalie Meg Evans
Coming next year ...
this novel is a new departure for Natalie Meg. To be published alongside her popular wartime stories, it is a journey into the shadowy world of supernatural doings, where evil is real and present and the forces of Light must step up if good people are to survive.
Set in 2010 when winter solstice co-incided with a rare eclipse, The House by the Stones introduces white witch Marivon Hayle whose solitary life on Bludstone Heath is fractured when a dark eminence from her past crashes into her present.
Marivon passionately believes that only her late father can give her the strength to fight back and she attempts to replicate his rituals. But events prove that she, alone, has the power to fight this evil and restore her beloved home to peace.
She soon discovers that the source of malice is closer to home than she imagined.
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