#BlogTour-‘The Manor On The Moors’ by Liz Taylorson

About The Book

Alice has landed her dream job, searching the Misterley Manor archives for tales of the elusive Gilbert Fox-Travers – life should be perfect, if only she could untangle her complicated love life…

Caroline is desperately trying to keep Misterley from falling down around her ears, and it’s a tough enough job without throwing a stroppy teenager, a difficult ex-husband and a cantankerous father into the mix.

When disaster strikes, Caroline and her family must pull together to save her beloved family home…Can Alice uncover the mystery of Gilbert Fox-Travers in time to save the Manor?

This is the first Liz Taylorson book that I have read and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Set in North Yorkshire, this regional romantic comedy was exactly what I needed to be reading right now-it was light, funny yet the characters weren’t superficial they were fully rounded and very relatable.

One of my favourites was Aunt Marjorie who was quirky and funny yet spot on with her advice for her niece, Caroline, who is bound by family ties to Misterley Manor and her father, Sir Henry Lattimore. Her love for, and need to protect the family seat has resulted in divorce from That Man (her husband Duncan) who merely wanted to open the house to the National Trust. Putting her foot down, she is pinning her hopes on a stable restoration/extension into a potential hot spot for weddings.

Running parrallel to Caroline’s storyline is that of Alice, who is hoping to find the missing link in the hostory of famed architect and artist, Giles Fox-Travers who mysteriously disappeared. The only evidence she has is the Lattimore family letters which has taken lengthy persuading for her to be allowed to read them.

Both Caroline and Alice have man trouble-Alice with her partner Sebastian who wants her to marry him and give up on being a student and Caroline who feels bitter towards Duncan, and raising her daughter, Emily, who has a freedom  that she never did as a teen.

Over seeing the restoration whilst constantly juggling bills and worries about her blind , possibly suffering from dementia father who has become an agitated recluse, and dealing with Alice’s excitement about academic breakthroughs, both women suddenly have decision making taken out of their hands when disaster-and love!-stike unexpectedly.

A novel with huge heart, love, humour and a gripping plot, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Manor On The Moor’ and found myself glued to the very last page!

Thank you Liz, Tracy and Manatee books for having me on this blogotur, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

About The Author

As a child, she was always to be found with her head in one and she still has a bookcase full of her childhood favourites to this day. (As a thirteen-year-old she read The Lord of the Rings twelve times in a row, cover to cover!) All this reading led, unsurprisingly, to a degree in English Literature, (and another book-case full of books) and then a job as a cataloguer of early printed books for a major university library. This meant spending hours sitting in a beautiful, ancient building looking at antique leather-bound tomes – although as so many of them turned out to be rather boring volumes of sermons she wasn’t tempted to read them! She went on to train others to catalogue books and her earliest attempts at writing anything as an adult consisted of instructions on how to work out the correct form of an author’s name to use in a library catalogue.

Children (and then cats and chickens) interrupted her bibliographic career, and having given up library work Liz found herself doing more reading, and increasingly she found herself enjoying novels by writers like Trisha Ashley, Katie Fforde, Milly Johnson and Lucy Diamond. Inspired by their example, she started writing fiction and hasn’t stopped since, joining the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s wonderful New Writers’ Scheme to try to learn how to write novels properly in 2015. She has also attempted writing some short stories, with one The Second Princess winning a competition in Writing Magazine which led her to think that maybe publication wasn’t a pipe dream after all.

Liz owes everything to her tolerant and long-suffering husband Ben and her tolerant and long-suffering children, but very little to the cats who are neither tolerant nor long-suffering and keep sitting on the computer keyboard and messing up her manuscript if she forgets to feed them on time.
When not reading or writing Liz is often to be found on stage (or behind it) with her local amateur dramatic society, drinking tea, or visiting one of the several North Yorkshire seaside villages which were the inspiration for the fictional Rawscar, the setting for her debut novel The Little Church by the Sea.

Links https://liztaylorson.wordpress.com/

Twitter @taylorson_liz

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TaylorsonLiz/