Nora & Kettle

  Frankie, we’re coming.

  Acknowledgements

  This book is primarily about love and survival. So I want to thank the people who taught me about these two things. The way they work together. How they are inextricably linked in times of adversity.

  Love comes in many forms as everyone knows. Romantic love, love of family, of friends, and of oneself. To me, it is the backbone of getting through, the thing that holds us up when the world is trying to pull us down to the dirt. And even if we do fall, I think it somehow stops the dirt from clinging.

  My inspiration for this novel came from two people who survived some of the most appalling conditions during their internment during World War Two, my grandparents, John (Grandad) and Jeanne (Nanna).

  During the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, they were thrown into two separate internment camps in Singapore. Grandad was beaten severely, starved and forbidden from seeing his wife and baby. Nanna, still nursing her young infant at the time, was forced to eat rodents and insects just to survive. They were just nineteen, newly married and in love, facing conditions no one should ever have to face.

  But they got through, and if you asked Nana how, her answer, in her very vibrant and animated way of speaking, was love, the hope she would see Grandad again, and that they would get out, make a life for themselves, and never look back on the muddy, razor wire-surrounded grounds of those camps again.

  They did get out. They had another child (my father) and went on to live fulfilling lives—ones full of love, grandchildren, color, and laughter. But they were shortened lives, which makes me even more thankful that they shared their stories with me.

  There isn’t much I would wish for in this world, but to have them back, to have had more time with them than I did, would be my biggest one.

  For surviving, for your love, hope, and beautiful souls, thank you, thank you, thank you.

  I wouldn’t be here without you.

  About the Author

  Lauren Nicolle Taylor lives in the lush Adelaide Hills. The daughter of a Malaysian nuclear physicist and an Australian scientist, she was expected to follow a science career path, attending Adelaide University and completing a Health Science degree with Honours in obstetrics and gynaecology.

  She then worked in health research for a short time before having her first child. Due to their extensive health issues, Lauren spent her twenties as a full-time mother/carer to her three children. When her family life settled down, she turned to writing.

  Author of the best selling Woodlands Series, she is also a 2014 Kindle Book Awards Semi-finalist and a USA Best Book Awards Finalist.

  Don’t miss the second book in the Paper Stars series!

  Breaker & the Sun

  New from Lauren Nicolle Taylor, the best-selling author of Nora and Kettle, comes a fresh take on a classic tale.

  Breaker Van Winkle is a recently returned Vietnam vet, struggling with PTSD and the difficulties of readjusting to civilian life with his mother. Eighteen-year-old Sunny is a high-achieving Chinese-French immigrant who fled Vietnam during the war. Sunny is usually as cheerful as her name implies, but she has her struggles too. Haunted by violent memories of the bombing that killed her parents, and chafing under the rule of her eccentric grandmother, she finds solace deep in the Catskills, at a place she calls the Ugly Tree.

  When Breaker stumbles upon Sunny and the Ugly Tree, things start to change. They are drawn to each other, and feel called to the tree. As they spend more time together and their relationship deepens, they notice that their time at the tree is becoming twisted somehow. Sunny's mind yawns and her ambitions begin to slip away. Breaker feels safe and carefree, his memories finally burying themselves in the distant past. They are being lulled toward a tempting, peaceful sleep—but there is a cost to this magical serenity, and it may be more than either of them can bear…

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