The Crone Club [Formato Kindle]

<span>         When Cass attends a reunion of her old class-mates, she has no idea that her life is about to change forever.  </span>

<span>          </span><span>She only accepted the invitation in the faint hope of seeing her old best friend George again and finally discovering why she vanished so completely on the last day of school. Unfortunately, George doesn't turn up and as Cass waits in vain, she soon wishes that she'd stayed away too, especially when her other friends start boasting about all the interesting things they've done over the years.  With increasing shame, Cass realises that her adult life has been a dull one; forty years of wasted talent and unhappy marriage to an abusive husband, without a single achievement or interesting experience to talk about.  Feeling insecure in the company of her old friends, she prays that no-one will ask her what happened to the old Cass, that promising musician who left school so full of energy and ambition in the '60s. </span>

<span>          </span><span>But when Cass finds out why George disappeared so mysteriously all those years ago, it makes her angry enough to walk out on her husband and boring old life for ever, to start a challenging new life with the friends she had known in her schooldays, a time when life was still exciting and her dreams were fresh.</span>

<span>          Now reunited, Cass and her friends form themselves into the Crone Club, in which each of them pledges to recover her forgotten youthful dreams and aspirations, and then turn them into a reality.  Nothing is going to stop these women having fun and not a single one of them has any intention of 'acting her age.'  </span>

        The Crone Club is the first of a series - each of which will have a different central character. Work has already been started on George's book, The Crone Christmas Club, which will be out in time for Christmas 2012.

S.V. Peddle is the pen name for Sandra and Vince Peddle. Vince and Sandra Peddle were born (respectively) in High Wycombe and Leicester. They first met twenty-six years ago when they were living in Crete, Greece. In fact, both keen travellers, they have – between them – also lived in such far-flung places as the USA, South Africa, Germany and Turkey – as well as Portsmouth, Manchester, Wellingborough and Watford (where for some years they owned and ran a large second-hand bookshop in the high street). In 2002 they moved to the island of Jersey. The Crone Club is their third book. The Moon Maiden was first published in 2003 by Blackie and Co. A revised second edition of this book has recently been published on Kindle and in Createspace. Pagan Channel Islands, a work of non-fiction, was published by Robert Hale in 2007 and re-issued in paperback in 2009. About the Crone Club Sandra has commented: "Vince has been instrumental in helping me shape the final version of this new book, but unlike our previous collaborations, The Crone Club is very much my own conception and is particularly close to my heart. I share experiences and values with some of the characters. I was born in Leicester in 1952, which makes me slightly younger than the Crone Club members, but I was profoundly inspired by the ‘hippy’ ideals of the 1960s. Like the protagonist Cass, I suffered a difficult (first) marriage. Like the bookish Alison I came from a working class background and attended a Secondary Modern school before transferring to a Grammar School to take my A levels. I also became a feminist at university. Like the nomadic George, I have travelled abroad, teaching English as a Foreign Language."