Friday, September 28, 2018

National Brave Day – is it possible to be brave when your heart is broken?



The release of my novel The Love Detective coincides with National Brave Day and so I’ve been thinking about how, in our different ways, many of us are brave but don’t consider ourselves to be so. Getting over a break-up for example. Or a divorce. Then learning to trust again. Learning to love again…or not. The following is a piece I wrote that may strike a chord with some of you:
As I waited for you to say what you had come to say, my heart beat so hard that it hurt. If I’d ever tried to picture a heart breaking I think I would have imagined a sudden and a loud shattering crack. A splintering. Shards of glass, shards of ice ricocheting, damaging. But I found that it wasn’t like that.
When you said the words that I’d known were coming all along, my chest became free of its constriction, all tightness gone. I felt my heart burst. Burst wetly, liquefying into a hot, shrieking, wailing banshee. It was an immediate disassembly; ugly and raw. Not a clean sharp break at all. I was now literally all heart. A spongy mass exhaling its last deep sour breath.

After a few hours’ sleep and all of the bottle of Merlot that you had opened but not stayed to drink, I awoke fully clothed on my bed to feel the wetness dispersing quickly like flood water. A tide draining away leaving muddy, sucking sinkholes.
Since then my heart has continued to dry out until only strips, like the wrappings wound about a mummified body, remain. It is now a desiccated thing. It continues to beat, for which I suppose I should be grateful. I breathe in and I breathe out. In and out. In and out. I live. I function. But the pulse of love has quite gone.


The Love Detective
A Clarry Pennhaligan Mystery


Angela Dyson

Genre: Chick-Lit, Thriller, Women’s,
Contemporary Fiction

Publisher: Matador Books

Publication Date: 28  September 2018

ISBN: 9781789010282

"Pacy, funny and exciting. Cynical yet romantic at heart, Clarry is a girl that you can't help but like - and root for...." – Independent Reviewer

“He’d thought himself the hunter, that I was easy prey but what he hadn’t bargained for, was contending with a woman who hadn’t eaten a square meal in twenty-four hours. I get mean when I’m hungry.”

Clarry Pennhaligan, low on ambition but high on energy, can’t seem to come up with a proper grown-up plan to kick-start her life. Planning really isn’t her thing. But then she happens upon her true vocation: Snooping.  Discovering other people’s secrets and getting paid for it. What could possibly go wrong? Well……as it turns out, just about everything and soon Clarry finds herself in real danger.

The Love Detective is the first in a series due for release in September 2018. The second book will follow in late spring 2019.



Author Angela Dyson Reads from The Love Detective

Read an Excerpt Here:

Read a Steamy Excerpt Here:


About the Author:

Angela Dyson ditched her London life and downsized her home to move to the sticks in Surrey, to follow her dream to become a professional author. She loves to write but to pay the bills (Angela soon discovered that utility companies, bank managers and landlords aren’t known for their generosity and understanding natures,) she had to squeeze the writing in with working for a living. Some of the jobs to which she only gave half her attention have included working for a recording studio and a record label, running a building maintenance company where pretty much the only upside was getting to boss a lot of men about all day, doing a bit of plus size modelling (strictly clothes on) and, for one memorable summer, making a living reading palms on a Greek Island.



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