SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY
Little Beach Street Bakery #2
Jenny Colgan
Releasing March 22nd, 2016
William Morrow
The New York Times-bestselling
author of Little Beach Street Bakery and Christmas at the Cupcake Café returns
with a delightful new novel-with recipes!-that is already an international
bestseller and is perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes, Meg Donohue, and Sophie
Kinsella.
For fans of Jojo Moyes and Elin
Hilderbrand, an irresistible novel—moving and funny, soulful and sweet—about
happiness, heartache, and hope. And recipes.
A thriving bakery. A lighthouse to
call home. A handsome beekeeper. A pet puffin. These are the things that Polly
Waterford can call her own. This is the beautiful life she leads on a tiny
island off the southern coast of England.
But clouds are gathering on the
horizon. A stranger threatens to ruin Polly’s business. Her beloved boyfriend
seems to be leading a secret life. And the arrival of a newcomer—a bereft widow
desperately searching for a fresh start—forces Polly to reconsider the choices
she’s made, even as she tries to help her new friend through grief.
Unpredictable and unforgettable,
this delightful novel will make you laugh, cry, and long for a lighthouse of
your own. Recipes included.
BUY NOW
Amazon | B& N | GooglePlay | iTunes | Kobo
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Chapter 1
Jenny, congratulations on the
release of
SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY.
Tell us the truth, how
much fun is the research?
Oh I just love bread
so much. I am terrible. If I’m making, eg, cheese rolls it’s hard to actually
get them to the table, instead of just eating them straight out of the
oven.
What is your favorite
part of the writing process? Exploring new story lines? Getting to
know the characters more in depth?
I love the big bits
everyone loves- the first meeting, the first kiss, the deaths! All the big
dramatic scenes are fun. If I manage to get a bit of a tear jerker in I’m
delighted.
Do you have a character that is
most like you, and how?
Oh yes, but from way
back really; probably Holly in Talking to Addison. Her life is a lot like mines
was then in my twenties. These days all my characters are much more capable and
calmer than I am! I generally favour the ‘headless chicken’ approach to
life.
Do you have a favorite scene from
SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET?
Anything with Neil in
it.
Do you have a favorite recipe or
go-to comfort dessert?
I do love a lemon
cake. I like it far too lemon-y, far more than anyone else likes .
What are you working on now?
I am writing
Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery, and a new children’s story for Neil!
Thank you for chatting with us!
A Word from Jenny
Hello! And
welcome to the Little Beach Street Bakery… if you’ve been here before, lovely
to see you again! If it’s your first time, well, you are so welcome, and I hope
you are hungry. Let me give you a quick catch-up before we get started. (Neil
fans: don’t worry. He’s back).
Okay, so
Polly lost her business in Plymouth and had to start all over again. She moved to
a coastal town in Cornwall, where the tide comes in twice a day and covers the
causeway. When she couldn’t find a job, she started baking bread, because
that’s what she loves to do, and soon incurred the wrath of Mrs. Manse, who ran
the town bakery (very badly).
Anyways,
eventually Polly won her around and started working there. Meanwhile, she has a
brief affair with one of the fishermen, Tarnie, then found out to her utter
horror that he was married. He later died in a terrible storm, and it took –
and is still taking – everyone a very long time to get over it.
Polly fell in
love, finally, with Huckle, a big American chap who makes his own honey. She
also inadvertently adopted a puffin and has, probably against her better
judgment, just decided to buy a lighthouse.
Right, I
think we’re up to date! I do hope you enjoy Summer
at Little Beach Street Bakery; I so loved writing it.
A Quick Word about the Setting
Cornwall to
me is a place of the imagination as much as a real home to lots of people
because I spent so much time there as a child. To me, it is like a version of
Narnia or any of the other imaginary lands I liked to visit – I was absolutely
obsessed with Over Sea, Under Stone,
and of course the Famous Five and Malory Towers.
We used to
stay in old tin-miners’ cottages near Polperro. My mother was a great Daphne du
Maurier fan, and she used to put me and my two brothers to sleep in the little
narrow beds and tell us bloodcurdling stories of shipwrecks and pirates and
gold and wreckers, and we would be utterly thrilled and chilled and one of us,
probably my littlest brother – although he would probably say me – would be up
half the night with nightmares.
Compared to
chilly Scotland, sunny Cornwall was like paradise to me. Every year, we were
bought those big foam body surfboards as a special treat, and we would get into
the water first thing in the morning and body surf, body surf, body surf until
physically hauled out, sunburnt along the crossed strap lines of my swimming
costume, to eat a gritty sandwich wrapped in cling film.
Later my dad
would barbecue fish over the little home-built Barbie he constructed every year
from bricks and a grill, and I would sit in the high sweet grass, read books
and get bitten by insects.
And after
that (because you get to stay up very late on your holidays), we’d drive down
to Mousehole or St. Ives and eat ice cream while strolling along the harbor
looking at the art galleries. Or we’d eat hot salty fried potatoes, or fudge,
the flavors of which I was constantly obsessed with, even though fudge
invariably makes me feel sick.
They were
blissful times, and it was such a joy to revisit them when I started writing my
Mount Polbearne series. We went on a day trip – as required by law, I think, of
anyone visiting Cornwall – to St. Michael’s Mount, and I remember being gripped
and fascinated by the old stone road disappearing under the waves. It was the
most romantic and magical thing I could possibly imagine, and it has been such
a joy setting my books there. If I can convey through my books even a fraction
of the happiness Cornwall has brought me in my life…well, I’ll be absolutely
delighted.
Jenny xxx
“Stop it,”
Polly said in a warning voice. “It’s not funny.”
Neil ignored
her and continued to beat on the little high window with his beak until she
could be persuaded to go over and give him a snack.
He was
outside the lighthouse they had moved into the previous month, all three of
them together, Polly, Neil the puffin, and Huckle, Polly’s American boyfriend,
who has parked his motorbike and sidecar at the bottom of the tower. It was
their only mode of transport.
The
lighthouse hadn’t been lived in for a long time, not since the lamps were
electrified in the late seventies. It has four floors and a circular staircase
that ran around the sides, thus making it, as Huckle had pointed out more than
once, the single draftiest place in human history. They were both getting very
fit running up and down it. One floor held the heavy machinery that had one
turned the workings, which couldn’t be removed. On the top floor, just below
the light itself, was their sitting room, which has views right across the bay
and, on the other side, back toward Mount Polbearne, the tidal island where
they lived and worked, with its caseway to the mainland that covered and
uncovered itself with the tides.
From these
windows you could see the little Beach Street Bakery, the ruined shop that
Polly had revitalized when she has moved to the village just over two years
ago, getting over a failed business and a failed relationship back on the
mainland.
She hadn’t
originally expected to do much in Mount Polbearne except sit and lick her
wounds until she was ready to head back into the fray again, back to working a
corporate lifestyle; hadn’t for a moment thought that in the tumbledown flat
above the shop she would come back to life by practicing her favorite hobby –
baking bread – and that this would turn into a career when she reopened the old
closed-down bakery.
It wasn’t the
most lucrative of careers, and the hours were long, but the setting was so
wonderful, and her work so appreciated, by both the townspeople and the
tourists, that she had found something much satisfying than money: she has
found what she was meant to be doing with her life. Well, most of the time she
thought that. Sometimes she looked around at the very basic kitchen she had
installed (her old flat in Plymouth had sold, and she’d managed to get the
lighthouse at a knockdown price mostly, as Lance the estate agent had pointed out,
because only an absolutely crazy person could possibly want to live in a draft,
inaccessible tower with a punishing light shining out of it) and wondered if
she’d ever manage to fix the window frames, the window frames being number one
on a list of about four thousand things that urgently needed doing.
Huckle had
offered to buy the place with her, but she had resisted. She had worked too
hard to be independent. Once before she had shared everything, been entirely
enmeshed financially with someone. It had not worked out, and she was in no
mood to repeat the experience.
Right now,
she wanted to sit in her eyrie of a sitting room at the very top of the house,
drink tea, eat a cheese twist and simply relax and enjoy the view: the sea,
ever changing; clouds scudding past so close she could touch them; the little
fishing boats bobbing out across the water in faded greens and browns, their
winches and nets heavy behind them, looking tiny and fragile against the vast
expanse of the sea. She just needed five minutes’ peace and quiet before
heading down to the bakery to relieve her colleague Jayden for the lunchtime
shift.
Neil, the
little puffin who had crashed into her life one night in a storm and remained
there ever since, did not agree. He found the activity of flying outside, high
up, and still being able to see her through the window utterly amazing, and
liked to do it again and again, sometimes taking off to fly all the way around
the lighthouse and come back in the other side, sometimes pecking at the glass
because Huckle thought it was funny to feed him tidbits out of the window even
though Polly had told him not to.
Polly put
down her book and moved over to the window, struck as she never ceased to be –
she wondered if she would ever grow tired at it – by the amazing cast of the
sun silvering in and out behind the clouds over the waves, the gentle cawk of
the seagulls and the whistling wind, which could turn thunderous on winter
days. She still couldn’t quite believe she lived here. She opened the old-fashioned,
single-glazed window with its heavy latch.
“Come in
then,” she said, but Neil fluttered excitedly and tried to peck in between her
fingers in case she had a tasty treat for him.
Win a Print Copy of
SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY
Jenny Colgan is the New York Times-bestselling author of numerous novels,
including Christmas at the Cupcake Café, Little Beach Street Bakery, and Meet
Me at the Cupcake Café, all international bestsellers. Jenny is married with
three children and lives in London and Scotland.
Lovey interview. Thank you for hosting SUMMER AT LITTLE BEACH STREET BAKERY today!
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