September is proving to be a very busy month, both in terms of work and socialising. We have had constant house guests since the beginning of the month and I am working on three books. One is my Food Fetish book which is being edited by my good friend, Anne, and the others are by two Italian writers.

I am finding them both very exciting projects. The first is a poetry collection – Arcobaleno/Rainbow – by Sara Rossetti and I am publishing a dual language edition in Italian and English. I am very pleased with the way it is progressing and it should be available on Amazon (and hopefully Apple) in October.

The other is a novel/memoir entitled Faded Letters by Maurizio Ascari and explores both the human condition and a very traumatic period of Italian history centred around World War Two and the experiences of a forced labourer in Germany. This too should be published in October.

Soon I hope to start work on the novel, Dorek, by Marianne Francis (my pseudonym). It is not exactly a sequel but it is a follow-up to my previous novel, Clarisse.

I am feeling very happy as I have just received a very good review for Clarisse from the academic, Verina Jones:

There is a powerful allusion here to one of the fundamental archetypes of the European novel, but with several twists. Francis’s Clarisse might be an “honest woman” (almost) like Richardson’s “redeeming virgin”, but she is Clarisse not Clarissa, indeed “Clarisse in Potignac”. Clarisse might be in Potignac but she is not really French, or really English for that matter. She is in a sense Italian, at least in part. Clarisse’s great-grandmother, whose story she is writing “in the form of a novel”, was of Italian descent.  Her name was Raiza, a transparent anagram of Zaira, who is the protagonist of another novel by Marianne Francis’s alter ego.

Watch out for this and other refined narrative ruses in a novel which races through like a thriller while engaging with the great issues of life.