Writing on the Road by Natalie Hart, author of Pieces of Me
As part of the Legend Press Blog Tour, I’m featuring a guest post by Natalie Hart. She’s the author of Pieces of Me, an award-winning debut novel. Natalie fills us in on how travel influenced her telling of this unique and moving story.
Synopsis:
For fans of A Thousand Splendid Suns, Anatomy of a Soldier, Girl at War and Yellow Birds.
Emma did not go to war looking for love, but Adam is unlike any other.
Under the secret shadow of trauma, Emma decides to leave Iraq and joins Adam to settle in Colorado. But isolation and fear find her, once again, when Adam is re-deployed. Torn between a deep fear for Adam’s safety and a desire to be back there herself, Emma copes by throwing herself into a new role mentoring an Iraqi refugee family.
But when Adam comes home, he brings the conflict back with him. Emma had considered the possibility that her husband might not come home from war. She had not considered that he might return a stranger.
Title: Pieces of Me
Author: Natalie Hart
Publisher: Legend Press
Genres: War Fiction, Military Romance, Psychological Fiction
Print Length: 288 pages
Audible Length: 10 hours 57 minutes
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Synopsis and edition information provided by Goodreads and Amazon.
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Writing on the Road by Natalie Hart
How do places affect our writing, especially when we move between them so often? My debut novel Pieces of Me (Legend Press, October 1, 2019) is a book with a British protagonist that takes place between Colorado Springs, USA and Baghdad, Iraq. I wrote Pieces of Me in Iraq, the USA, and the UK, but also in Tunisia, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Iraqi Kurdistan, Italy and even on a small sailboat crossing the Atlantic. When I look through the notebooks I used as I wrote and re-wrote the novel, on each page I have written both the date and location, because every single place – in its own way – has found its way into the novel.
[box] No matter where I was in the world, writing was my constant.[/box]
I am a firm believer that travel shapes us. I am lucky enough to have travelled for work, for love, and for friendship. It has impacted my being and my writing in all sorts of ways. Travel shapes our thoughts, our language, our view of the world and how we see our place it in. Living abroad can be a daily challenge that forces us to confront our own narrative of whom we are, what we believe and why. Sometimes the places we go and the things we do will change how we answer these questions. Pieces of Me tries to explore some of those questions.
Shortlisted for Costa First Novel Award 2018
Travel has infiltrated Pieces of Me in terms of the wider themes of the writing, but also in all kinds of tiny, barely perceptible ways. Word by word, sentence by sentence, it is a novel that reads to me like a code of my travels. Consciously or subconsciously, I have let different people and places creep onto the pages, and it wouldn’t be the same book without them. Most of these connections exist only in my head and my heart, but this feels like a good place to share some of them.
Mosaics feature strongly in Pieces of Me, symbolising fractured lives, fractured identities and the way that even the most broken pieces of us can be made into something beautiful. I know the exact moment that mosaics became part of the book. While working in Tunisia in 2017 and editing the novel, I visited the Bardo National Museum. It is a stunning museum with a beautiful collection of Byzantine and Roman mosaics and I wandered around in awe.
Unfortunately, it is not these mosaics that give the museum notoriety, but rather the 2015 terrorist attack at the museum that killed 22 people and injured around 50 more. I wanted to focus on the art and history of the place, but as I walked through the echoey rooms with their bright white walls, I could not help but think about what it must have been like to be there during the attack and where the survivors were now. I knew that somehow the mosaics had to be included.
Prima Magazine Best Books of the Year
The book is full of these moments. The mention of an Arabic ringtone is inspired by a song I had on my phone while living in Syria. The descriptions of Skype conversations are rooted in a particularly difficult period of my life in Germany. There are friendships and nights out from Mexico. A podcast I listened to in London. And from the middle of the Atlantic, there is a description of the ocean that I wrote and rewrote until it turned into something else entirely. There are names in there too, hidden, of two people who took their lives during my writing journey.
Being on the road so much can be a blessing but also a challenge, so perhaps it is fair to say that writing shaped my travel too. No matter where I was in the world, writing was my constant. I often woke up at 6am, got a coffee and spent the first hour of my day inside the world of Pieces of Me – a routine that was crucial for me. When I was in countries where I knew no one, I knew my characters. When life and work and the world felt unstable, the book was a path guiding me through. It was a destination.
The Reading Agency Top Debuts of 2018
I hope that my readers experience some of the places I have been through my writing and that perhaps they will stop to consider the different places they have been – whether different cities or states or continent – and how these places have shaped them too.
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Comments are greatly appreciated. Please scroll to the bottom to find the comment section!
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Author Biography
Natalie Hart is a writer, strategic communications consultant and qualitative researcher. Legend Press is publishing her first novel, Pieces of Me on October 1, 2019. It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. Natalie specializes in conflict and post-conflict environments. She has worked extensively across the Middle East and North Africa, including three years in Iraq. Natalie has a BA in Combined Middle Eastern Studies (Arabic and Spanish) from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
https://www.nataliehartauthor.com/
@NatalieGHart
Pieces of Me: Shortlisted f...Shop on AmazonPieces of MeShop on Amazon
Pieces of MeShop on Amazon
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Pieces of Me is available in Kindle, Paperback, Audiobook, and Audio CD
Also available in the EU using the link below
Pieces of MeShop on Amazon
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Other stops on the Pieces of Me Blog Tour:
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Treading the Uneven Road by L.M. Brown
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