Heathcliff by Sue Barnard - Book Blitz + Giveaway
Heathcliff
It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now…”
Cathy’s immortal words from Wuthering Heights change Heathcliff’s life. At just seventeen years of age, heartbroken and penniless, he runs away to face an unknown future.
Three years later, he returns – much improved in manners, appearance and prosperity.
But what happened during those years? How could he have made his fortune, from nothing? Who might his parents have been? And what fate turned him into literature’s most famous anti-hero?
For almost two centuries, these questions have remained unanswered.
Until now…
Purchase Link - mybook.to/heathcliff
Excerpt
Excerpt
Here, the coachman Thomas Braithwaite relates how Heathcliff describes
his early life.
“When we first arrived at the house,” the stranger went on, “Mr
Earnshaw – that’s the man who found me – handed me to his wife. As I recall,
she didn’t seem to be very happy about having another child in the house. But
he insisted, and told her that they would name me ‘Heathcliff’. This was the
name of a son of theirs who’d died some years earlier. They had two other
living children: a boy called Hindley and a girl called Catherine.”
His voice wavered as he said her name. I wondered if this ‘Catherine’
might be the girl who had so recently broken his heart.
“She was the same age as me,” he went on. “Her brother” (here his
voice hardened) “was a a few years older. He took against me right from the
start.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
“To begin with, it was because he’d asked his father to bring him a
fiddle back from Liverpool, and it had got crushed in the folds of the
great-coat as he’d been carrying me. Then, afterwards, he got it into his head
that his father preferred me to him.”
“And did he?”
“I don’t know. But Mr Earnshaw certainly treated me like a son.
Hindley hated that, but his father sent him away to school, and after that life
got much easier. But when the old man died – that was three years ago – Hindley
inherited the house and came back to run it. That was when things really
started to go wrong. He stopped all my lessons with the curate, made me live
with the servants, and forced me to work on the farm like a common labourer.”
“What about Catherine?” I asked.
“What about her?” His voice was expressionless.
“Did she treat you badly too?”
He paused before answering. “Not in that way,” he said eventually, in
a voice so low that I could barely discern the words.
“But in another way?”
“Yes. In the worst way possible. She betrayed me.”
“So – was she the girl you told me about when we spoke yesterday
evening?”
He nodded. “My Cathy. I love her to death.”
His tone made me shudder. Whose death did he have in mind? His own, or
hers, or someone else’s?
Author Bio –
Sue Barnard is a British novelist, editor and award-winning poet whose family background is far stranger than any work of fiction. She would write a book about it if she thought anybody would believe her.
Sue was born in North Wales but has spent most of her life in and around Manchester. She speaks French like a Belgian, German like a schoolgirl, and Italian and Portuguese like an Englishwoman abroad.
Her mind is so warped that she has appeared on BBC TV’s Only Connect quiz show, and she has also compiled questions for BBC Radio 4's fiendishly difficult Round Britain Quiz. This once caused one of her sons to describe her as "professionally weird." The label has stuck.
Sue’s first novel, The Ghostly Father (a new take on the traditional story of Romeo & Juliet), was officially released on St Valentine's Day 2014. Since then she has produced five more novels: Nice Girls Don’t (2014), The Unkindest Cut of All (2015), Never on Saturday (2017), Heathcliff (2018), and Finding Nina (2019).
Sue now lives in Cheshire, UK, with her extremely patient husband and a large collection of unfinished scribblings.
Social Media Links –
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AuthorSusanB
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suebarnardauthor/
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