I have quite a bit going on in my life at the moment and had intended to take a complete 10 day break from blogging, but when I heard that Love Books Group was holding a one day blog blitz for lovely Clare Flynn’s brand new book, A Painter in Penang, I knew I had to participate. Clare was last on the Linda’s Book Bag earlier in the year when she was celebrating The Pearl of Penang‘s publication. You can read what happened on that occasion here.

Having stayed in with me to chat about The Alien Corn in a post you can see here, Clare also featured on the blog when she wrote a fabulous guest post about the North South divide when The Green Ribbons was published. You can see that post here.

Clare’s A Painter in Penang was published on 6th October 2020 and is available for purchase here.

A Painter in Penang

Sixteen-year-old Jasmine Barrington hates everything about living in Kenya and longs to return to the island of Penang in British colonial Malaya where she was born. Expulsion from her Nairobi convent school offers a welcome escape – the chance to stay with her parents’ friends, Mary and Reggie Hyde-Underwood on their Penang rubber estate.

But this is 1948 and communist insurgents are embarking on a reign of terror in what becomes the Malayan Emergency. Jasmine unearths a shocking secret as her own life is put in danger. Throughout the turmoil, her one constant is her passion for painting.

From the international best-selling and award-winning author of The Pearl of Penang, this is a dramatic coming of age story, set against the backdrop of a tropical paradise torn apart by civil war.

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I miss travel so much and having been through Nairobi several times and having been to Penang relatively recently I have a feeling that A Painter in Penang might be just teh book to transport me back!

About Clare Flynn

Historical novelist Clare Flynn is a former global marketing director and business owner. She now lives in Eastbourne on the south coast of England and most of her time these days is spent writing her novels – when she’s not gazing out of her windows at the sea.

Clare is the author of eleven novels and a short story collection. Her books deal with displacement – her characters are wrenched away from their comfortable existences and forced to face new challenges – often in outposts of an empire which largely disappeared after WW2.

Clare’s novels often feature places she knows well and she does extensive research to build the period and geographic flavour of her books. A Greater World – 1920s Australia; Kurinji Flowers – pre-Independence India; Letters from a Patchwork Quilt – nineteenth century industrial England and the USA; The Green Ribbons – the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century in rural England, The Chalky Sea – World War II England (and Canada) and its sequels The Alien Corn and The Frozen River – post WW2 Canada. She has also published a collection of short stories – both historical and contemporary, A Fine Pair of Shoes and Other Stories.

Fluent in Italian, she loves spending time in Italy. In her spare time she likes to quilt, paint and travel as often and as widely as possible. She is an active member of the Historical Novel Society, the Romantic Novelists Association, The Society of Authors, NINC and the Alliance of Independent Authors.

For more information about Clare, visit her website, where you will find a free copy of Clare’s exclusive short story collection, A Fine Pair of Shoes, follow her on Twitter @clarefly and find her on Facebook.