I’m delighted to be part of the launch celebrations for The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days by Juliet Conlin, bringing you a wonderful extract from the book as well as a chance to win your own signed copy.

The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days is published today, 23rd February 2017, by Black and White and is available for purchase in e-book and paperback here and directly from the publisher.

The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days

Approaching 80, frail and alone, a remarkable man makes the journey from his sheltered home in England to Berlin to meet his granddaughter. He has six days left to live and must relate his life story before he dies…

His life has been rich and full. He has witnessed firsthand the rise of the Nazis, experienced heartrending family tragedy, fought in the German army, been interred in a POW camp in Scotland and faced violent persecution in peacetime Britain. But he has also touched many lives, fallen deeply in love, raised a family and survived triumphantly at the limits of human endurance. He carries within him an astonishing family secret that he must share before he dies… a story that will mean someone else’s salvation.

Welcome to the moving, heart-warming and uncommon life of Alfred Warner.

An Extract from The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days

The forest air was warm and drowsy and smelt of dusk and moss. Alfred knew that later on, after sunset, the forest would lose its sluggishness and be transformed into a wondrous strange and busy place, alive with crisp rustles and sporadic skirls: quick sharp movements as prey evaded predator, or else succumbed to claw and beak and tooth. But for now, at the end of a long, hot summer’s day, the forest was listless and quiet. Alfred began to feel sleepy and he closed his eyes.

Then he heard a voice. It was a whisper – hissskkss, shhhhts, psstss – coming from somewhere above him to the left. Alfred had spent enough of his young life in the forest to know that this was no bird or other creature, or any other sound the windless forest could produce. It was a human voice, a woman’s voice. It was too low for him to make out the words, but something in the inflection made him recognise it was a question. A moment later, another voice, slightly to the right. And although this too was a whisper, or perhaps more of a sigh, he could tell that this was a different voice and that it was answering the first. He opened his eyes and lifted his head to the boughs above him. He did this out of curiosity, not because he was afraid, being, developmentally, on the cusp of leaving a world in which hearing voices could still quite easily be reconciled with the stark objective realities of life.

However, with his eyes open, the voices seemed to dim. He shut his eyes again, opening his hearing to its most sensitive, and then:

OF COURSE HE’S NOT AFRAID, ARE YOU, ALFRED?

Alfred fell from his nook and hit the ground hard. He fell, not just because of the loudness and suddenness of the voice, but because he realised at once that the voice had not come from outside, but from inside his head.

Giveaway

For your chance to win one of two signed paperback copies of The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days, click here. Open internationally. Giveaway closes at UK Midnight on Wednesday 1st March 2017.

About Juliet Conlin

Juliet Conlin was born in London and grew up in England and Germany. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Durham. She works as a writer and translator and lives with her husband and four children in Berlin. She writes in both English and German.

You can visit Juliet’s website and follow her on Twitter. There’s also a launch tonight in Edinburgh if you can make it:

There’s more too with these other bloggers: