Dear Readers, thank you for choosing to read a Carol Rivers saga during your busy day.
A little note from Carol.
What is a saga you might ask? Well, like our fashions, our homes and our relationships have personal terms, 'saga' is a category that defines a genre of publishing, for places like bookshop and libraries.
Sagas can be written at any time in history from Samuel Pepys to Josephine Cox or Harry Potter. Generally sagas involve the lives and loves of family characters. All the heroines you’ll meet in the Rivers novels will have lived during the period of 1900 to 1950, an extraordinary half-century of tumult and world wars.
For businesswoman Lizzie Flowers the time is just after World War 1. Britain is struggling to regain some sort of normality both at home and abroad. Food rationing, illness and disease, death and destruction and wonderful new inventions and medicines are the name of the game. Lizzie and her large family have more than enough to contend with trying to earn a living from their greengrocery business. Just like my grandfather whose East End shops managed to survive despite the vicious gang extortion and terrible working conditions. Violence and crime were endemic in Docklands, but my grandad and his family somehow avoided catastrophe. In turn, my dad and mum were born and raised on the Isle of Dogs and never forgot their roots.
Bearing all this in mind you'll see why Lizzie of Langley Street was my first book and probably the one which flowed most easily from my fingertips. I related to every character and when my artist husband painted the portraits of all my cast, the book came alive. For historical accuracy you'll find reading Lizzie of Langley Street will set things straight for you - I even took my characters into the Siege of Sidney Street. But as we know, Eastenders can handle themselves pretty well!
The next books were just as enjoyable to write, although I had in mind to write a sequel to Lizzie which I did some years later called Lizzie and the Family Firm. (I wonder why?) Then there was Lily and Rose, Birdie and Bella and many more heroines - all thrown into the chaos of East End life and determined to find light in the darkest of times.
In one of my novels Girl With Secrets the family has to evacuate to the country, since it's 1938 and the world is on the brink of war. At nine years old young Daisy Purbright is more concerned with her passion for collecting secrets than a looming invasion. But one day she uncovers an ugly truth and puts her whole family at risk, throwing the people she loves most into imminent danger.
As for the trusting and innocent orphan Ettie O’Reilly of 1880, she knows no other family but the nuns who took her in at birth. Raised and cherished by the Sisters of Clemency in 1880, Ettie must finally leave her adopted home and survive in the real world. But a terrifying ordeal awaits and Ettie begins to learn what life is really like in the gutter of society.
As for my books' setting of East London, they could easily spring from any capital city in the world with a strong multicultural influence. But London remains my muse. I hope that with each book I've recorded with accuracy the fact and fiction of the life and times of our great capital the Romans named as Londinium.
Thank you again for your interest. I am truly grateful. In fact, I would encourage anyone to read any topic or genre whenever they have the chance. A book is a magic key. All you need do, is turn it.
My very best wishes and happy reading.
Carol X
www.carolrivers.com