Blog Tour: Mary Hooper - Guest Post, Extract & Giveaway

Today is the final day of Mary Hooper's Blog Tour for her stunning new book, Velvet and Mary has kindly written a guest post about her Fantasy Dinner Party Guests:

Fantasy Dinner Party
(five people, living, dead or fictional that you would invite and why)

Do people still have dinner parties? I would probably have an Indian takeaway then we can all gather around the foil dishes and I wouldn’t have to worry about all that cooking.

Elvis Presley. He was my number one crush when I was fourteen. I had 120 photographs of him on my wall and I used to kiss every one of them before I went to bed. When I saw a trailer of TWILIGHT the other day I realised why girls had gone mad over Robert Pattison: he looks just like a twenty year old Elvis. Only not quite as gorgeous.

Heathcliff. I can’t see him fitting into a dinner party, or helping the other guests to a spoonful of Bombay pickle, and he’s a bit of a bad-boy cliché, but when he was invented by Charlotte Bronte he wasn’t a cliché at all. He’d hate everyone at the party and brood a lot, and when he left early we could all talk about him.

Jo Brand. I love Jo. I love her dry wit and her deadpan delivery, I love that she doesn’t care. I think I could be best friends with her. I don’t think she’d get on with Philip Larkin as a person, however, so I’m looking forward to a lively debate over the Tikka Masala.

Paul Whitehouse. Okay, I know he’s been around a while now, but he’s still my favourite comic. So versatile – the list of “characters” he has played or invented is endless. And nothing is funnier, or more poignant, than Ted and Ralph. It’s one of those rare pieces that make you laugh and cry at the same time.

Philip Larkin. Witty, erudite and a bit of a dark horse (impassive behind his glasses, but what about all those women he had on the quiet?) his poems linger in my mind like no others. From the endlessly debated and read-at- weddings, An Arundel Tomb, to the simple truth of This be the Verse to an eight-line poem about Myxomatosis which can reduce me (an ardent lover of rabbits) to tears, Larkin has a poem to cover it. Perhaps he’d care to immortalise my dinner party in a few well-chosen words...

Thanks very much Mary and Bloomsbury for allowing Teenage Fiction For All Ages to take part in the tour.

You can find out more about Mary Hooper at her website.
You can check out the earlier stops on the tour via her Facebook page

Scroll down to read an extract from Velvet and to enter the giveaway to win 8 of Mary's books.

Synopsis
Velvet is a laundress in a Victorian steam laundry. With both her mother and father dead, she is an orphan and has to rely upon her own wits to make a living. The laundry is scalding, back-breaking work and Velvet is desperate to create a better life for herself. Then Velvet is noticed by Madame Savoya, a famed medium, who asks Velvet to come to work for her. Velvet is dazzled at first by the young yet beautifully dressed and bejewelled Madame. But soon Velvet realises that Madame Savoya is not all that she says she is, and Velvet's very life is in danger ...A romantic and thrillingly exciting new novel from an acclaimed and much loved historical writer for teens.

Trailer




Extract
Velvet by Mary Hooper - chapter one.


Giveaway

Thanks to Bloomsbury, I have one set of: At the Sign of the Sugared Plum, Petals in the Ashes, The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose, At The House of the Magician, By Royal Command, The Betrayal, Fallen Grace and Velvet to giveaway.


The giveaway is open to UK entrants only and the closing date is 20 September 2011. To enter please complete the form below.