This holiday season, I'm looking forward to spending a little time with Eliza Graham's Playing With The Moon!  Whether you curl up before the fire with this gem or you give it to the fellow book lovers on your holiday list, I think we all have a real treat in store for us. 

 Here's a bit about the book and a look at what the critics have been saying!

 Shattered by a recent bereavement, Minna and her husband Tom retreat to an isolated village on the Dorset coast, seeking the solitude that will allow them to cope with their loss and rebuild their foundering marriage. Walking on the beach one day, they unearth a human skeleton. It is a discovery which will plunge Minna into a mystery which will consume her for months to come.

The remains are soon identified as those of Private Lew Campbell, a black American GI who, it seems, drowned during a wartime exercise in the area half a century before. Growing increasingly preoccupied with the dead soldier's fate, Minna befriends a melancholy elderly woman, Felix, who lived in the village during the war. As Minna coaxes Felix's story from her, it becomes clear that the old woman knows more about the dead GI than she initially let on.

Playing with the Moon has been nominated a World Book Day ‘Hidden Gem’.

Historical Novels Review
Eliza Graham tells a powerful tale and her characters are well drawn and believable. I enjoyed this book very much.

World Book Day website
…a penetrating reflection on the historical events that have forged our sense of British cultural identity. It is also skilfully constructed, deeply humane, and full of fascinating, flawed, characters.

The (London) Times
A chance visit to a depopulated Dorset village was the inspiration for Playing With The Moon, the first novel by a former Towers Perrin staffer turned freelance. Eliza Graham, who has worked for the actuaries for 13 years, spent the past five of these trying to find a publisher for the novel, which is about a 1940s inter-racial love affair and the eventual murder of a black GI. The village is Tyneham on the Isle of Purbeck, emptied in 1943 to be used in the preparations for the D-Day landings. "It was poignant, walking around the village," Graham tells me. "It was as if they just stepped out for a day or two – 60 years ago."

The Oxford Times
She seems to have hit on a winning formula, interweaving an evocative historical tale with a modern story of relationships.

Bookbag
I loved this book. It had me completely hooked before I'd read the first page and I didn't put it down until I'd read the last. The characters are compelling.

 A Little Q & A With Eliza!

RR:    How do you spend your free time when you're not writing?

EG:      When I'm not writing, there's a good chance I'm helping someone do their maths/Latin/spelling homework, finding an excuse to look at clothes on eBay or plowing through some proofreading as part of my day-job.
 

RR:    When did you know you wanted to be a writer? And did anyone in particular encourage you along the way?

EG:    I wanted to write from childhood onwards. My parents and later my husband gave me masses of encouragement.
 

RR:    Are you currently working on a new novel/project? And if so, can you tell us what it's about?

EG:    My next novel, RESTITUTION, comes out in September 2008. It's the story of people falling in love at the wrong time and place (Germany in 1945, as the Red Army moves in) and making decisions that will have devastating consequences for decades to come. I'm currently working on something new for me: a Young Adult novel. It's set in the London Blitz and includes mysterious refugees, spies, spivs, looters, bombed-out houses, air-raid shelters and lots of explosions. It's been simultaneously fun--and poignant--to write.

RR:    What's your favorite part of writing?  Starting something new? Revising what you've already got drafted? Developing characters? The plot?  Something else all together?

EG:    I love the occasional inspiration I get when I'm somewhere inappropriate (in the bath, shopping for food, on the way to take a child to a sports-ground, etc), It's like a shot of literary viagra. It doesn't happen to me as often as I'd like but it's so exciting when it does.

RR:    Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you got the call--I'm talking, the call--when you learned that you had sold your novel/project?

EG:    I was working away on my laptop at home when I received an email, not a call, and I kept scanning  it to see if I'd missed the bit that said, '...but I'd like to wish you all the best for the future.' When I couldn't find those oh-so-familiar words I yelled at my husband to come down and check the email for me.
 
RR:    Central Casting: If they were to make a movie out of your book, who would you cast to play your main characters?

EG:    I'm not sure about the younger members of the cast but possibly Dame Judi Dench for Felix, the elderly woman who knows the answer to the mystery in the book. I feel I would *have* to take personal control of the casting of the part of Private Lew Campbell, gorgeous young African-American GI who comes to an untimely end but is probably the nicest character in the book. Tough job but someone would have to do it...

RR:     What's the one book that you wish you'd read because everyone tells you should. This is  the one book that you keep attempting to read, the one everyone praises, but alas the one you just can't get through.

EG:    Hamlet. And I was supposed to have read it and every other single word written by The Man very thoroughly for my degree course in English at Oxford University. Still haven't quite, erm, managed it. But I have seen it on the stage several times (note of self-justification in voice now) and even read the early plays that many don't bother with, including the one in which people are murdered and made into meat pies and unwittingly eaten by their father (I think...). I don't know why I can't get through Hamlet in its entirety, even though I've enjoyed analysing parts of it.

More About Eliza 

Eliza Graham worked in marketing and PR before taking up writing nearly six years ago. She lives near Oxford, England, with her husband, two children and small menagerie. Playing with the Moon is her first novel. In Sept. 2008 Macmillan will publish her second book: Restitution about a German family with conflicting loyalties and a troubled history facing the terror of the Red Army invasion in 1945.

Thanks to Eliza for popping in--especially during this busy time of the year!  Please take a moment to visit Eliza's blog and click here to buy Playing With The Moon.