Blogiversary Giveaway: Take your pick from a selection of Women's Fiction Books

Today it's time for the other TBR giveaway, the chance for the winner to select one of the books currently languishing in my review piles that realistically I'm unlikely to read anytime soon. If you missed Monday's giveaway post explaining what the TBR giveaways are about, you can read it here.

The broad genre I'm using today is Women's Fiction as I have a mixture of books that cover Contemporary fiction, Romantic Comedy, Romance or Saga and I think in the selection of books below these are widely covered. As mentioned previously these are either duplicate copies where I already have a proof copy or eBook to review or have been received out of the blue and I'm unlikely to be reading for review in the near future.

Author Interview: Melanie Blake

Today it's my pleasure to welcome author Melanie Blake to the blog as part of The Thunder Girls blog tour to talk about her debut novel which was published last week.

Hi Melanie and welcome to the blog, can you give us a brief introduction to yourself and your writing journey.
My writing journey has been a long time coming because it took 20 years to get my novel The Thunder Girls published. I am an independent woman and a big supporter of female-led stories. I’m also very active in reaching demographics that are often overlooked by mainstream media, such as working class and older women, and I am most interested in mass entertainment, certainly not niche.

If you had to give an elevator pitch for The Thunder Girls, what would it be?
The Thunder Girls is a white-knuckle rollercoaster ride of friendship, betrayal, murder, and revenge. If you only had a chance to read one book this summer, you wouldn’t be disappointed if you chose this.

You've had a very successful and varied career over the years, from working with and managing pop stars, running a talent agency, journalist and playwright; what inspired you to put pen to paper and write The Thunder Girls?
I wrote the first draft of The Thunder Girls originally in 1999, and I got taken on by a major agent. There was a lot of buzz around the project initially until men in power in publishing and broadcasting at that time realized it was a story of women based in their forties and fifties, at which point they declared there was no interest in that demographic. Back in the nineties very few all-female led projects, where the women weren’t young girls, were green lit. I was actually offered a ton of money to change the girls’ ages and even though I was broke and living in a bedsit, I believed in the story and the women that tell it so strongly that I said no. It’s taken 20 years to get The Thunder Girls as it should be, and it was worth the wait.