Julia Sutton

The Author - Julia Sutton (https://juliasuttonauthor.wordpress.com) is an artist and writer from East Anglia, who has lived and worked for much of her adult life in continental Europe. Following eleven years spent in Paris,painting, exhibiting, teaching, she returned in 1997 to her native Suffolk coast, where she now lives and has begun to write full- time. Her short stories - many of them set in Paris- are published in literary magazines: AMBIT;STAND;HEAT Literary Journal (AUS) and online. A Sea Of Straw is her first novel.

The book:

"A Sea of Straw is a tale of vivid landscapes and dark shadows, of two rebel souls drawn together by chance, who must fight for their chance at happiness. A haunting debut.”

Kit Habianic, author of Until our Blood is Dry

"A beautifully written and elegiac story of love, politics and the cruelties of war. An emotionally satisfying read, lyrical and powerful in its psychological depths"

Amanda Hodgkinson, author of 22 Britannia Road, Spilt Milk.

SYNOPSIS

Will a man walk two thousand kilometres for a woman? In 1967, Zé will. Salazar’s Portugal has become a prison for him.

1966: When Jody, young mother and designer from the north of England, arrives on the Lisbon coast, she brings the lure of ‘Swing- ing London’ to Portuguese painter Zé’s existing dreams of freedom. A nascent love is interrupted when, back in England, husband Michael forces her to choose between their 2-year-old daughter Anna and Zé. And Zé, at home in Lisbon and grounded by the state’s secret police, can only wait.

For both Jody and Zé, love is revolution. Personal and political threads weave their story, a period piece set amid the then-socially conservative north of England, the light and rugged landscapes of modern Portugal, and the darkness of the dying years of Europe’s longest-running dictatorship. A Sea of Straw, with its pervading at- mosphere of saudades, is a quest for love in revolutionary times.