Guest Author - Hazel Osmond

• Publisher: Quercus (16 Aug 2012)
• ISBN-13: 978-1849164191

Hazel Osmond has been guest before sharing her WIP.  Now Hazel is celebrating the release of FIRST TIME I SAW YOUR FACE.

Photos courtesy of the author

Please tell us a little about your latest novel THE FIRST TIME I SAW YOUR FACE

It’s about Mack, who is an ex tabloid journalist who has tried to leave his muck-raking past behind him and Jennifer Roseby who has returned home to Northumberland after an accident. Their two paths would probably never have crossed if Jennifer did not have a famous cousin, Cressida, who is on the verge of making it big in Hollywood and Mack did not have a mother with an explosive secret past. To protect that past, Mack is blackmailed into travelling north and posing as a harmless travel writer in order to win Jennifer’s confidence so that he’ll get all the dirt on her cousin’s love life.

It’s a horrible job and when Mack arrives he discovers something about Jennifer which makes what has to do even more difficult.

The story has my trademark humour in it – a lot of the action involves an amateur dramatic group trying to put on a production of ‘Twelfth Night’ and southerner Mack’s struggles with the north– but those who like their romances with a fair bit of angst won’t be disappointed either.

What research did you have to do for this novel?

Lots!! I don’t want to give too much away, but that research has involved sheep, libraries, working with hot metal, alcoholism, ‘Twelfth Night’ and car accidents.

Did you know the characters before you started writing or did they evolve during the writing?

I knew them pretty well before I started, particularly Jennifer, and I was a bit stunned when Quercus showed me the proposed image of her on the front cover because it was as if they’d peered into my brain and got her exactly right. With Mack, although I knew how he would behave right from the beginning, as I wrote he morphed in my mind from Jake Gyllenhaal into David Tennant. I needed someone with that slight edge to them… who can seem to be one thing, but turn out to be another.

What is next from you?

Book 3 –  ‘Grace Under Pressure’ – set in London in the world of art gallery tours and the story of what happens when someone who seems very proper and under control, has a younger, rebellious man explode into her quiet life.

What are you reading at the moment?

I usually have a few books on the go. So I’ve got Talli Roland’s ‘Build a Man’ which I downloaded straight after reading ‘Watching Willow Watts’; non-fiction ‘Bad Science’ by Ben Goldacre and an anthology of the best short stories of 2011. Then it’s on to ‘Me Before You’ by JoJo Moyes… I’ve been saving it for my holidays so I can sob behind my sunglasses.

The lovely publishers are offering the chance to win one of 3 copies of this novel.


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