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Samantha Priestley

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Sam int from round ‘ere, poor love, but it int her fault and you shunt hold it against her, so don’t be racist or cityist or whatever it is. Sam’s from our great northern, brother city, Sheffield. This goes to prove how utterly cosmopolitan, inclusive and sophisticated we at Armley Press are. We spread our wings us and scour the world, Sheffield is a full 30 miles from Leeds and another Yorkshire city that is WAY bigger than any city over the Pennines that the BBC is obsessed with. Like Leeds it’s a city way under-represented by the Manchester Marketing Board, the national BBC. 
 
Samantha is a novelist and short story writer whose first novel, Despite Losing it on Finkle Street, was published by Pioneer Readers. Her short stories have been short listed in The Sid Chaplin competition, The Pages competition, The Mike Hayward competition, The Ted Walters competition, The Glass Woman Prize and The Binnacle Ultra Short at The University of Maine at Machias. She won first prize in The H. E. Bates competition and The Tacchi-Morris Arts Centre Prize.
 
Her first single story chapbook, Dreamers, is published by Folded Word and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 
 
When a hand delivered invitation to a funeral is dropped through Kate’s door by mistake, she immediately knows she needs to attend. During the service she whispers ‘Please forgive me’ to the dead man Peter, and afterwards meets his son Anthony for the first time.
 
Why does Anthony feel to blame for his dad’s death when Kate knows she was entirely to blame? And why does the previous tenant of Kate’s flat feel so much to blame for his death that she cannot sleep until she has returned from Portugal to apologise to Peter’s wife?
 
As more and more strands of the events leading up to Peter's death are gradually unravelled, Kate and her two new friends tell each other they should not blame themselves, but it turns out that they themselves have proved Peter's own words to be true: 'Rope is more reliable than people.'
 
Why John Lake chose: 'The lower-middle-class gentility of Lyme Regis makes an appositely deceptive backdrop for a tale that gets darker as it gets more complex. Ultimately, what I love about this book is the scope of the journey, from a moment of almost idle curiosity to a string of dramatic payoffs, each more satisfying than the last, keeping the reader in suspense till the final page. A fine achievement.’
 
 
 

 

 Derbyshire in the 1760s. A missing girl, a guilty husband, a suspicious but loyal wife, and a rural community searching for answers and for justice. It could be a legend torn out of the local history books and spiced up for the tourists. But for Lorraine, frustrated and unappreciated by her married lover, it begins to feel all too real because it's happening again - right here, right now.
 
A Bad Winter is a supernatural tale of love, murder and vengeance that will haunt you beyond the final page.
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