Tag: books

Meet the Author

Laura Kemp

Laura Kemp started writing to get out of doing a real job.

A journalist for 15 years, she turned freelance after having a baby because she couldn’t get out of the house, washed and dressed, until lunchtime at the earliest.

A columnist and contributor, she regularly writes for national newspapers and magazines, such as The Daily Mail, The Sun and Grazia, and spends too much time on Twitter.

Married with a son and a neurotic cat, Laura lives in the provinces, where she goes about her business ignorant of what’s on-trend until it reaches her town, by which time it’s out of fashion.

Laura’s first novel Mums Like Us was published by Arrow in February 2013 and Mums on Strike was published in January 2014. The Late Blossoming of Frankie Green was published by Head of Zeus in June 2016, The Year of Surprising Acts of Kindness was published by Orion in February 2018, and Bring Me Sunshine was published in June 2019.

Her latest novel, Under A Starry Sky, was published in paperback in July 2020.

As our featured author, Laura has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired her and her work as an author.

Read the interview here.

For more information about Laura and her books see her Facebook page or follow her on Twitter.

Eating Disorders Awareness Week

1-7th March 2021

Beat Eating Disorders

Binge eating disorder will affect one in fifty of us in our lifetime, it is the most common but least understood. It isn’t about being greedy or lacking in willpower, but a serious mental illness which many suffer with alone, often with the fear of how others might react the reason they don’t reach out for help.

Beat Eating Disorder have a range of resources to help spread awareness and start conversations on this topic. Click here to access.

The Library also has a selection of Eating Disorder texts. Visit our catalogue to view the range of titles. We can send these directly to you if you cannot access the Gosall Library. Please email: academic.library@lscft.nhs.uk stating the book you would like to borrow.

Meet the Author

Charlie Connelly

Charlie Connelly is a bestselling author and award-winning broadcaster. His many books include Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round The Shipping Forecast, In Search of Elvis: A Journey To Find The Man Beneath The Jumpsuit and And Did Those Feet: Walking Through 2000 Years Of British And Irish History. Three of his books have featured as Radio 4′s Book of the Week read by Martin Freeman, Stephen Mangan and Tom Goodman-Hill.

Charlie was also a popular presenter on the BBC1 Holiday programme and co-presented the first three series of BBC Radio 4′s Traveller’s Tree with Fi Glover.

His book Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace was shortlisted for the 2016 MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year. The book he wrote with his friend Bernard Sumner, Chapter And Verse: New Order, Joy Division And Me was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the NME Awards, while his most recent co-writing project, Winner: A Racing Life with the champion jockey AP McCoy was shortlisted for Sports Autobiography of the Year.

His book, Last Train to Hilversum, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019 and is followed by his latest work, The Channel, published in 2020.

He has written comedy scripts for BBC radio and RTÉ radio in Ireland and made documentaries for BBC Radio 4 on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Noel Coward and the legendary cricket coach Alf Gover.

As our featured author, Charlie has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired him and his work as an author.

Read the interview here.

For more information about Charlie, his career and his books visit his website or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Meet the Author

Debbie Johnson

Debbie Johnson is a best-selling author who lives and works in Liverpool, where she divides her time between writing, caring for a small tribe of children and animals, and not doing the housework.

She worked as a journalist for many years, until she decided it would be more fun to make up her own stories than to tell other people’s.

After trying her hand at pretty much every genre of writing other than Westerns and spy dramas, she now specialises in creating uplifting women’s fiction that seems to make people laugh and make people cry, often at the same time.

Her books focus on the things that really matter to most of us – love, family, community and getting by with a little help from our friends. They include The A-Z of Everything and the hugely successful Comfort Food Cafe series.

Debbie has now sold more than 1,000,000 copies of her books, and is published in the USA, France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Turkey, Italy and Ukraine. Two of her books – The A-Z of Everything and Never Kiss A Man in a Christmas Sweater – have been optioned for film/TV.

As our featured author, Debbie has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired her and her work as an author.

Read the interview here.

For more information about Debbie and her books visit her website or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Meet the Author

Milly Johnson

Milly Johnson is an international novelist, poet, after-dinner speaker, professional joke writer, script-writer, columnist, cruise correspondent, short-story writer and winner of Come Dine With Me. She lives in Barnsley with her partner, her teenage sons, rescue cats, her dog and Alan the rabbit.

After leaving university Milly trained for a while as an accountant in a building society, a job she truly hated. She supplemented her income by writing copy for greetings cards by Purple Ronnie. Having some of her poems turned into these popular greetings cards spurred her on in her writing and she started to write her first book.

A succession of jobs followed. In offices, mills, banks, sales, exports – she hated them all, but loved the women she worked with and they informed her writing. She worked with older women who showed her that friendships knocked down barriers of age, background, colour, creed. And she worked with younger women who were fabulously nutty. She ‘lived’ in her 20s and 30s – had some great times and horrific times and it coloured and enriched how and what she wrote.

When she was made redundant the week before finding out she was pregnant, Milly wrote off to greetings cards firms and asked them to buy her wares. And they did. She set up a little company called ‘Black Sheep’ and became a professional joke writer which was the best job she had ever had in her life. She was content, happy, working from home with a wonderful set of people to meet up with on work events… but there was just that one missing piece in her jigsaw. It was the silver medal job and there was only one gold – the novel.

Milly fell pregnant at the same time as two of her pals. Their journey through pregnancy was an insightful one and she experienced a lightbulb moment. Realising that extraordinary exists within the parameters of ordinary, everyday life she started to write a story about friendships, Yorkshire, pregnancy and work. And the rest is history.

She got her publishing deal when she was 40. She loves what she does and hopes that this comes through in her work.

As our featured author, Milly has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired her and her work as an author.

Read the interview here.

Read more about Milly, her path to becoming a writer and her books on her website or follow her on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook

Meet the Author

Catherine Jones

Catherine Jones is a best-selling romantic novelist, also writing as Kate Lace and Fiona Field.

She went to one, all-girls’ school from 4 -18 and left to join the army where the ratio of men to women (500:1) was much more satisfactory. In the next few years she met her husband, moved countless times and discovered extreme sports.

When, after eight years of marriage, she fell pregnant and had to give her job up, she produced three children in four-and-a-half years and wrote a book taking the micky out of being an army wife. Luckily even the army liked the book so her husband kept his job until he decided that 17 moves were more than enough and it was time to stop.

Catherine now writes romantic novels (she has had 22 published), lives in her own home in Oxfordshire where she has put down roots, got to know her neighbours and looks after her cats, kids and husband (not listed in any order of priority). She is vice chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and captained their team in University Challenge – The Professionals in 2005.

As our featured author, Catherine has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired her and her work as an author.

Read the interview here.

Donating Books

We are looking for good quality used books to add to our stock for our patient libraries

If you have any books that you have finished with that you would be willing to donate to the library please let us know. These can be dropped off in the library or posted to us in the internal mail:-

The Gosall Library, Lantern Centre, Vicarage Lane, Preston PR2 8DW

The books will be sent to our patient libraries at the Harbour, Guild Lodge and the Cove for our patients to enjoy.

We are looking for books of up to about 5 years old, or in good condition, in any genre, paperback or hardback, including books suitable for children and young people (ages 8 to 18).

If you have a pile of books waiting to be taken to the charity shops when they re-open maybe we can take them off your hands instead! Or, as spring is just around the corner, maybe it is time for a spring clean?

Please email us with any queries: academic.library@lscft.nhs.uk

A big thank you from the library team

Meet the Author

Neil White

Best-selling author Neil White is a criminal lawyer as well as a crime writer.

He was born above a shoe shop in Mexborough, a small northern mining town, and grew up on an estate on the edge of Wakefield. His father worked in the shoe trade but seemed happiest when he was reading a book, and he filled the house with them: sci-fi, horror and history books. And if it wasn’t books, it was Johnny Cash who took over.

Neil’s books were initially set in America but after rewriting them to change their settings to England he had more success. After swapping Chicago for London and Indiana for a small town in Lancashire he caught the interest of a publisher.

He veered away from crime briefly and wrote the book he had always wanted to write, Lost In Nashville. He had always wanted to visit the places Johnny Cash sang about, so he did, but crafted a book from it. It is a tale of a father and son who travel Johnny Cash’s life and songs and try to reconnect along the way. It is his favourite of all his books, purely because it has so much emotional resonance for him.

Eventually Neil gave up full-time lawyering and turned mainly to writing, although he still practices as a freelance lawyer.

Neil has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired him and his work as an author.

Read the interview here.

Read more about Neil, his love of Johnny Cash, his books and his career on his website.

Meet the Author

Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde is a popular best-selling author of modern day romance books. She believes that falling in love is the best thing in the world, and wants all her characters to experience it, and her readers to share their stories.

Katie first started writing when her mother gave her a writing kit for Christmas, and once she started she just couldn’t stop. She has now written 28 novels. Her first, Living Dangerously, was published in 1995 and her most recent, A Springtime Affair, was published in paperback in January this year.

Each of Katie’s books explores a different profession or background and her research has helped her to bring these to life. She has been a porter in an auction house, tried her hand at pottery, refurbished furniture, delved behind the scenes of a dating website, and has even been on a Ray Mears survival course.

Katie has kindly answered a few questions for us about books that have entertained and inspired her and her work as an author. Read the interview here.

Read more about Katie, her love of writing and her career on her website and blog or follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Fiction Collection

Now that we are into a new year why not try reading something new, a new author or genre maybe?

We have a large collection of fiction in the Gosall library, you can search our catalogue here. If you normally read crime or mystery novels why not try reading a biography? Or if fantasy is normally your bag why not give romance a go?!

We have a few ideas on display in the main library and the rest of our fiction collection can be found in the snug. Please feel free to browse and check out any books of interest using the self-issue machine. Alternatively, email the library team at academic.library@lscft.nhs.uk and we can post books out to you.

The library team is also happy to recommend books for you.