Blog Tour - The Story After Us

Publication date 14th July 2018

Amazon UK

About the book

Perfect for fans of Marin Keyes and Motherland - and for all women who have found their happy-ever-after turned out to be no fairy tale. Grown-up, sparkling, funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting.

If she tries very hard, Ami can remember when she used to have a dynamic and exciting career and a husband who she loved more than life itself, and who was equally smitten with her...
Now she has two children, a terrifyingly large mortgage, and no idea who she has become - or why she and her husband can't even be in the same room anymore.

With life as she knew it in tatters around her, Ami is heartbroken, and in no way pulling off ‘consciously uncoupling’ like a celeb. But she's starting to wonder if she just might come out the other side and be....happier?

As funny as Helen Fielding, as poignantly touching as Marian Keyes, Fiona Perrin's dazzling debut is a story that is as much about finding out who you really are again, as it is about the exhausting balancing act of motherhood. Unmissable for women everywhere. 

Buy now links:
Amazon: mybook.to/StoryAfterUs
Kobo: http://bit.ly/2JTLSHq
iBooks: https://apple.co/2MsSMlE 
Google play: http://bit.ly/2JJ3PVP 

About the author
Fiona Perrin was a journalist and copywriter before building a career as a sales and marketing director in industry. Having always written, she completed the Curtis Brown Creative Writing course before writing The Story After Us. Fiona grew up in Cornwall, hung out for a long time in London and then Hertfordshire, and now writes as often as possible from her study overlooking the sea at the end of The Lizard peninsula.

Follow Fiona
Website: https://fionaperrin.com/
Twitter: @fionaperrin
Facebook: @fionajperrinauthor
Instagram: @fionaperrin

Follow Aria
Website: www.ariafiction.com
Twitter: @aria_fiction
Facebook: @ariafiction
Instagram: @ariafiction
Extract
As I sat on the sofa waiting for Liv, images rushed through my brain the way they say they do when you are on your deathbed. The first time Lars and I ever met – me opening the door to him in a towel because he’d banged on the door of our rented flat when I was in the bath. The way my voice couldn’t stop going up and down as his did then, with his strong Swedish accent. Our first date, when he’d sung Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ to me in the same voice. Dancing in Tobago to reggae on our honeymoon. Later – when we’d bought the house we lived in now – dancing again, but around our new kitchen because we couldn’t believe our luck. The sense of him – clean, loving, determined – through all those years. Watching him stride around with Tessa strapped to his chest in a sling. Conceiving Finn in a four-poster in a country-house hotel…
How had all that hope and love come to this? I hugged a cushion closer to my chest and then there was the noise of Liv arriving outside on her boneshaker of a bike.
From the window, in the yellow of the streetlight, I could see her auburn hair flying behind her and her white skin pinked with cold. I waited at the top of the steps while she locked up her bike and pulled her bag from the basket.
She climbed up, grabbed me in an enormous hug and said, ‘Oh, Ami. You poor baby.’
I erupted into tears.
She shepherded me inside, took off her coat and pulled me down onto the sofa, where she held me against her scarlet jumper until I finally stopped crying.
‘Thanks for that. It’s really difficult getting snot out of lambswool,’ she said. I gave her a weak smile. ‘So, is this really it?’
‘I think so,’ I said – but I didn’t want to believe it and another warm tear slid down my face. I was like a thundercloud, plump with rain, which had yet to burst again, but where every so often a fat drop escaped.
Liv pulled a bottle of what looked like very expensive Châteauneuf-du-Pape from her bag. ‘My landlord gave it to me. I think he wanted me to drink it with him. But this is an emergency.’ Liv’s landlord claimed to be a marquis, although when we’d searched online we couldn’t find any mention of his title. He’d met Liv at a party, fallen in lust and rented her his basement at a rock-bottom price. He wobbled home about teatime every day from the pub, pie-eyed.
She went and got a corkscrew, emptied my glass of cheaper plonk and filled two new ones very generously. Then she sat down again and I told her, in between bouts of sobbing, what had happened.
‘He thinks working so hard is the right thing to do for all of us, and I can’t make him see that we need him here – I need him here,’ I said at the end. ‘He keeps going on about how broke we still are – but that’s because we keep having to put money back into his business. It’s a vicious circle.’
‘What I do know is that it’s time to stop putting up with it.’
‘It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’ve got this really important meeting tomorrow. And Tess keeps going on about dying – she’s already really affected by us arguing all the time.’
She pulled me close. I quietly sobbed into her shoulder until eventually she pushed me back, thrust tissues in my face and said, ‘Maybe it’s for the best. He’s made you so unhappy now for so long.’
‘But what if I could change him back into how he was? I mean, we were so fantastic in the beginning and it just seems like life and work and kids has taken over. All I want is the old Lars back.’
‘Darling, we’ve so had that conversation,’ she said, but gently. ‘And you know what we decide every time? There’s no way that the Lars you married is coming back.’
She got up and paced up and down in front of the fireplace. Behind her was a row of silver frames showing pictures of Lars and me through the last ten years – first just the two of us, then our wedding photos surrounded by family and friends, then with Tessa and Finn.
‘Look.’ Liv came back and sat on the sofa and held my hands. ‘This is a bloke who sometimes doesn’t even turn up for bloody marriage counselling. You know what I think every time you tell me that?’
I nodded and the familiar feelings of rage started to course through my veins, followed by a crushing sadness. ‘I vowed we’d stick together forever and I really wanted to make sure my children had a happy home.’
She nodded, her pale blue eyes unusually serious. ‘I know, but you can’t be the only one trying. He has to try too.’
I smiled weakly.
‘You’re going to be OK,’ said Liv. ‘Very OK. It’s very fashionable to get divorced, you know, what with all this conscious uncoupling. Clebs do it all the time. Then they take pictures of themselves being “aren’t we civilised even though we’re divorced?”, going out for breakfast with the kids. There’s a feature I read recently: decree nisi-ly or something like that.’
I shuddered. ‘There’s nothing nice about this. You’d better go or you won’t get up for work.’ Liv quite often didn’t get up for work. She was a contributing editor at a low-print-run style mag whose mission was to celebrate everything original. It was called Pas Faux and she’d gone to work there the previous year in an effort to save her breadline writing career before it became toast. Unfortunately, her overactive social life – mostly shagging boys who’d just passed their A levels – got in the way.
‘I can stay the night?’ Liv said, but I knew she hated the idea of being woken up by children in the morning.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said and eventually, after a little more crying and hugging, she wobbled off down the road on her bike.
I poured myself another glass of posh wine and rang my mother.
‘Oh, God,’ said Mum from her Gloucestershire kitchen. ‘Oh, poor darling. Surely it’s just an argument. He’ll come back.’
‘It’s beyond that.’