#Blogtour #Review #Guestpost: The Last Day by Claire Dyer @ClaireDyer1 @DomePress @emily_glenister #TheLastDay

Release day - 15th February 2018
Book length - 256 pages
Publisher - The Dome Press
Book Depository - www.bookdepository.com
Amazon UK - www.amazon.co.uk
Amazon US - www.amazon.com

I want to thank Emily from www.thedomepress.com for the opportunity to take part in this blog tour and for providing me with a copy of this book for review. I also want to thank Claire Dyer for her fascinating guest post which you can read below. 


ABOUT THE BOOK

They say three's a crowd but when Boyd moves back into the family home with his now amicably estranged wife, Vita, accompanied by his impossibly beautiful twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend, Honey, it seems the perfect solution: Boyd can get his finances back on track while he deals with his difficult, ailing mother; Honey can keep herself safe from her secret, troubled past; and Vita can carry on painting portraits of the pets she dislikes and telling herself she no longer minds her marriage is over.

But the house in Albert Terrace is small and full of memories, and living together is unsettling.

For Vita, Boyd and Honey love proves to be a surprising, dangerous thing and, one year on, their lives are changed forever.


MY REVIEW

I don't know what I expected when I picked up THE LAST DAY by Claire Dyer but it was not this - this beautifully layered, heartbreaking, and emotional story of three imperfect people who have all suffered in their lives and are still suffering in many ways. 

When Boyd finds himself with some financial issues the only logical solution is to move back in with his estranged wife and take his live-in girlfriend, Honey, with him. Vita is strong and capable and wants to show Boyd how much she has moved on and is unaffected by Boyd or Honey but as they settle into their own strange routine, Vita will have to confront many emotions as they bubble up to the surface. Honey feels that it should be awkward, and it is at times, but she likes Vita, and she adores Boyd - after all, he is so much more than she ever expected after the life that she has lived, the past that she is afraid will come back to haunt her or worse. And then there is Boyd who loves Honey, still loves Vita in his own way, and struggles with the relationship with his mother. He just wants to make everything right for everyone but doesn't know how to do it.  And then on the last day, something inconceivable will happen that will change them all forever ...

I instantly loved Vita and her no-nonsense attitude and as her story unfolded it broke my heart to see the woman behind the strength. I didn't want to like Honey but I did. She is such a gentle character who has experienced some horrific abuse in her past and I felt her desperation to hold on to the happiness that she has carved out for herself, but yet you always got the feeling that the darkness would come back for her. Boyd is a guy who has so much grief and regrets in his life but isn't quite sure what to do with it and he is determined to do right by those he loves and cares about but as they all live together, their relationships will alter in ways that even they do not realise.

​THE LAST DAY by Claire Dyer is a superb read and I devoured it in one night (lucky for me I'm a bit of an insomniac!!). The characters, the writing, the emotion, it is all just so rich and beautiful and it will make you feel every smile, shed every tear, and ache over every heartbreak, and feel hope when it flourishes too. Absolutely amazing!!

GUESTPOST

The search for happy ever after

It is always tempting to write, ‘and they lived happily ever after’ but it is rarely that people actually do. There is always a next day. 

In Sonnet 116 Shakespeare professes that ‘Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove:’ ‘Oh no!’ he says, ‘It is an ever-fixèd mark’. However, just looking at our bookshelves we can see that writers through the ages have been preoccupied not necessarily by this, but by love’s ever-changing nature: Anna Karenina, Rebecca, The Bridges of Madison County, The End of the Affair, The Great Gatsby (the list goes on) all deal with the million shades of love that people can feel for people other than those with whom they had promised to share their ‘happy ever after’.

And, with these stories come a host of different definitions of right and wrong and many types of endings. That we are left to determine how we feel about the storylines and endings authors give us is one of the many things that novels can bestow on us as readers
In The Last Day I really wanted my characters to be happy.
Ideally happiness comes when we love the people we should, we do the jobs we enjoy, our children are healthy and reside under the same roof as we do, and we all live in a world where there is an overriding sense of equality, justice, kindness and fair play. But, if my characters did inhabit such a world and live such lives, there would be no tension or conflict and therefore, I suggest, there would be no middle-of-the-night anguish, no mercy dashes, no forbidden kisses, no secret dreams, no sacrifices, no overarching joys and these are the things that make fiction compelling. 

So, instead I made my characters unhappy: I let them fall in love in ways they shouldn’t; I gave them anguish, secrets and heartbreak and made them make decisions (some right, some wrong) that have far-reaching consequences. However, I also wanted them to find their own happy-ever-afters in amongst all the conflict and tension. Some do and some don’t and whilst I know how I feel about that, I have to leave it to the reader to decide how they feel for themselves and this, perhaps, is one of the scariest bits of having a book published and put on other people’s bookshelves.


AUTHOR BIO:

Novelist and poet who likes love stories and cheese. Author of 'The Last Day', 'The Moment', 'The Perfect Affair', 'Eleven Rooms' & 'Interference Effects'.

For more information:
Website - clairedyer.com
Twitter - twitter.com/ClaireDyer1
Facebook - www.facebook.com/Claire-Dyer-Author-131347343704266/
Instagram - www.instagram.com/clairedyerwriter/

DON'T FORGET TO CHECK OUT ALL OF THE OTHER STEPS ALONG THE WAY!!