Helen Simonson's Blog: Is the first novel the hardest? - Posts Tagged "sussex"

The harder I look, the more the possible edits multiply. The more I correct, the more errors the copy editors ferret out. The closer to deadline, the more impossible it seems that I can ever let the book out of my grasp. Surely there is one more fierce line to write? Fortunately the publishing process moves along and my time is almost up. My second novel, The Summer Before the War, will be published in March 2016. I see it already listed on goodreads. Set in East Sussex, in the glorious summer that was 1914, it tells the story of an independent young woman arriving in an ancient, settled-in-its-ways town, to take up a post teaching Latin at the grammar school. Such a radical idea is bound to set the tongues wagging and Beatrice Nash will face opposition and discover new loyalties as an impossible war looms just beyond the horizon.