A sweeping love story set in occupied France in 1944 where an art-forger is blackmailed by the British government into looking into the loyalties of a French priest, rumoured to be a collaborator. For fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Kate Morton and Letters to the Lost.
THE HIDDEN HEART
by Theresa Howes
on submission
(via Mushens Entertainment)
1944. Marguerite Segal, an artist living under a false identity on the Cote d’Azur to escape her criminal past, is blackmailed by British Intelligence into befriending Father Etienne Valade, a local priest suspected of being an Nazi collaborator. Her mission is to persuade him to pass on information from the high ranking German officers who attend his church. Connected by a passion for art, they soon fall in love. As she tries to convince him to pass on information learned in the confessional box, her association with him increasingly puts her in danger of violent reprisals from the local people. At the same time, her covert work, creating false identity cards to camouflage those hiding from the Third Reich, brings her under the scrutiny of the occupying enemy.
As the Allied invasion draws closer, Marguerite has to work out who she can trust in a world where everything is at stake. Should she put her faith in the man she loves, without knowing the motivation behind his actions? Or by trusting a man so full of contradictions, will she be aligning her fate with that of a man whose heart she cannot know?
Theresa Howes lives in London, and has a background as an actor. Her work has been long-listed for the Mslexia Novel Award, the Bath Novel Award, The Caledonia Novel Award, The Lucy Cavendish College Prize, and the BBC National Short Story Award. Theresa is already working on her second novel: at the end of WWII, a female war reporter who was used as a honey trap by British Intelligence during the war is trying to rebuild her marriage until the high ranking British officer she exposed as traitor reappears in her life, determined to get his revenge.
Best friends Efe and Sam meet as teenagers in 90s London. Efe is a new arrival in the UK from Ghana, sinking under the weight of her parents’ expectations. Sam is focused and idealistic, taking his first steps towards a career in corporate law. Over the years that follow the best friends become lovers, then marry. But an unplanned pregnancy forces them to confront just how radically different they want their lives to be. Soon Efe is swallowed up by the demands of motherhood, the dreams for her life dangling from a thread. And when she leaves, disappearing one morning and leaving both Sam and their daughter behind, Sam’s illusion of their perfect marriage crumbles. He’s about to discover exactly who he’s married to and the lengths he’ll go to win her back. 
Every year millions of pediatric patients could benefit from hypnosis therapy to deal with and alleviate physical and psychological symptoms big and small. The benefits of hypnosis-facilitated therapy range from complete cures to small improvements. They extend beyond the physical and into the psychological and spiritual, building confidence, positivity and resilience. They include the empowerment of children with chronic health issues to feel more in control of their own minds, bodies and circumstances. They sometimes lead to the reduction or even elimination of medications. Hypnosis is painless, non-invasive, and cost-effective. It doesn’t preclude any other treatment, and drawbacks are virtually nonexistent.
Thirteen essays are included that explore the evocative scents of trees, from the smell of a book just printed as you first open its pages, to the calming scent of Linden blossom, to the ingredients of a particularly good gin & tonic. In your hand: a highball glass, beaded with cool moisture. In your nose: the aromatic embodiment of globalized trade. The spikey, herbal odour of European juniper berries. A tang of lime juice from a tree descended from wild progenitors in the foothills of the Himalayas. Bitter quinine, from the bark of the South American cinchona tree, spritzed into your nostrils by the pop of sparkling tonic water. Take a sip, feel the aroma and taste of three continents converge.
FOOLED is a book about why we fall for the schemes of liars, deceivers, marketers, con artists, and anyone else who tries to trick us into believing or doing something in their interest rather than our own. It identifies ten specific reasons why we are easily deceived, drawing upon classic and current research in cognitive psychology and the social sciences to explain exactly how deception works, why all of us are fooled at least some of the time, and how we can avoid being scammed—or even scam the scammers in return. FOOLED is not a book about why people cheat, but about how they manage to get away with it.