Everything Will Be All Right, sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life and book 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series, was released this week by the publisher, Next Chapter. Here’s a link to both, https://books2read.com/u/4DKPAd

on Amazon (US) and if you click on it, it will take you to two clickable buttons, one for the Kindle and one for the paperback. Other versions will come out (large print, an ebook other than Kindle, hardcover and many sizes of paperbacks and an audio version), but this is what’s launched now. 

However, I encourage you to order through a local bookstore or a preferred independent online store (A Room of One’s Own, Hudson Booksellers, etc.), even though you can’t write an Amazon review if not purchased through them. Bookstores can order through Bookshop.org or however they order all their other books, and mine are available to them.

Out a few days and already it’s in the top 100 bestselling LGBTQ+historical fiction on Amazon US!

Here are some descriptions I wrote for Amazon yesterday:

 About Everything Will Be All Right:

Splintered by emigration, World War Two and secrets kept from one another, the Prestons are a Northern Irish family grappling with the past, dislocation, and a frightening and uncertain future. Throughout their lives, members of the larger Preston family are split along lines of strongly supporting one another, or barely holding together. Facing separation in their violent and sectarian times, can they find the strength to reunite? In this sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life, Everything Will Be All Right is book 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series.

After Belfast is bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941, Meg Preston and her partner Lillian Watson escape the horrors inflicted upon their city for the relatively safe Causeway Coast of Northern Ireland, bringing with them their friend Mildred, sisters Florrie and Beryl, and their sons, Robert and Albert. Meg Preston’s seventeen-year-old nephew Robert Henderson enlists in the Royal Navy, both to escape his smothering parents and the dawning knowledge that he is gay. Robert endures active duty in the dangerous North Atlantic before assignment to a minor codebreaking role at Bletchley Park, where he meets Jo and Holly, two young Irish women in the Royal Navy with similar assignments. 

The three become lifelong friends, as their experience at Bletchley Park is silenced by the Official Secrets Act for life, adding to the burden of the secret kept from many in the Preston family about Jo’s daughter’s paternity.

The post mid-century sectarian violence, known as The Troubles (as it also had been called in the 1920s) erupts, pulling Jo’s daughter Rosie and Robert into civil rights activism and danger.

Enduring the stresses of intimate relationships, global and local catastrophes, but thriving due to the relief found in community both inside and outside of the family, the Prestons’ story is one that resonates during our own stressful times. 

Amazon also asked for my description of what it was like to write the book and that was fun to write:

Everything Will Be All Right, book 2 of the Finding Their Way Home Series, was written over two years of the pandemic and is the sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life, published in 2019. Inspired by the poem of the same title by Ulsterman Derek Mahon, who died in 2020, and experiences a Northern Irish family like mine may have had over the mid-20th century, the novel allowed me to spend more time with the fictional characters from Heroine as well as new ones, while happily researching the time period.

As a novelist, I was able to give the characters experiences my family did not have, and to explore favorite pieces of history, such as the great work at Bletchley Park, work that saved the United Kingdom from almost certain defeat by the Nazis. My creative role also allowed me to provide a community that would have been rare for the gay characters to experience and happier conclusions for many of the characters than reality would have provided in the harsh landscape of the time and place. 

Dear Reader, if you buy from Amazon (US and UK), I’d very much appreciate a review there and also on Goodreads (Goodreads.com/review). Goodreads will accept reviews regardless of vendor.

I’m forever grateful for your support and I hope you enjoy Everything Will Be All Right!