Howey WI welcomed local novelist to meeting for pre-book launch party

Howey Women's Institute’s June’s meeting was so special it warranted the breaking out of the Prosecco alongside the usual “goodies.”

The celebration? A pre-book launch party for local novelist, Lindsay Jayne Ashford’s latest book “No Light But the Stars”

This is Lindsay’s 14th book and she has quite a following especially in the USA where her book publisher from 2014 is based.

Currently living in Crossgates, she was given her first publishing break, after eight years of trying, by Honno Welsh Women’s Press, an independent co-operative publisher headquartered in Aberystwyth.

It is the longest-running independent women's press in the UK, dedicated to publishing literature, novels, and classics by the women of Wales.

Established in 1986, Honno's primary mission is to increase publication opportunities for female authors born or living in Wales, and to expand the audience for Welsh women's writing across the globe.

In backing Lindsay’s first novel ‘Frozen’, Honno certainly fulfilled this mission, Lindsay is now involved in supporting Honno and is the current Chair.

Her writing career began with crime novels, perhaps not surprising with a background as a journalist for BBC Radio (remember Pebble Mill) and a degree in criminology.

Research is always thorough: for her first book, to the extent of accompanying the vice squad on the streets of Wolverhampton, where she heard first hand some heart-breaking personal histories.

After a crime series featuring a female forensic psychologist, Lindsay switched to historical mysteries.

A novel about the death of Jane Austen was dramatized for BBC Radio 4. A subsequent book inspired by events in the life of Agatha Christie, called ‘The Woman on the Orient Express’, has been translated into 13 languages.

The latest novel is set in her own historic 500 year old home, although transported to Cornwall and inhabited by two women who occupy the house three centuries apart, both with dark secrets. Lindsay told members of Howey W.I. that she drew inspiration for the story from witch marks found on the house beams, a Tudor hawking whistle on display at Radnorshire Museum and an Elizabethan miniature painting of a man standing in front of a wall of flames.

Member Karen Lathan said: “Intrigued, I succumbed and bought a copy - it’s quite the page turner.”