Spotlight & Giveaway: The Inbetween Days by Eva Woods

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Eva Woods to HJ!

From the author of Something Like Happy comes an uplifting and emotionally compelling novel about a woman in a coma fighting for a second chance at life, love and happiness.

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

When Rosie is hit by a bus, she wakes up in hospital with no memory of who she is or why she stepped out in front of it. Was it an accident, or was she trying to kill herself? Her memories begin to return, and Rosie finds herself re-living past days of her life, as she tries to make sense of who she is and why she’s here. Meanwhile, her sister Daisy is trying to find out the same things, and coming up with some surprising answers.
 

Please share the opening lines of this book:

Two hundred and fifty-three. That was how many people heard or saw it when Rosie Cooke stepped in front of the bus on a bright, cold morning in October, as it crossed a bridge spanning the gray, muddied waters of the Thames.
Another ten would have seen it, but they were so engrossed in their phones they didn’t know anything was wrong until the screams started, and the traffic stopped and for a moment in the beating heart of London everything was still and quiet and terrible.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• It features several characters that only Rosie can see, who she gradually remembers happen to be dead. Ghosts, or hallucinations of her injured brain?
• One of the most fun things to write was the flashbacks to the 80s and 90s, and remembering all the terrible fashions of the time.
• As a teenager, Rosie was cast as the lead in Pirates of Penzance, which is an operetta we also did at my school – but unlike Rosie I wasn’t good enough to be in it!

Please tell us a little about the characters in your book. As you wrote your protagonist was there anything about them that surprised you?

Rosie is the rebellious, messy sister, and as she learns, in the months before her accident she had fallen out with everyone in her life, including friends, family, colleagues, and the person whose name she said in the ambulance– Luke, the love her life. I never know exactly what I’m going to write before I start, so it took me a while to figure out what had happened in her past to make her so unhappy. Meanwhile, Daisy has always been the goody two-shoes sister, with a mortgage and sensible shoes. But as I wrote, the two sisters turned out to have a lot of each other’s personalities as well, despite their differences.

If your book was optioned for a movie, what scene would you use for the audition of the main characters and why?

Probably a scene where Rosie is ‘talking’ to her ‘ghostly’ visitors, but to the outside world she appears to be unconscious in a hospital bed. I’m not even sure how that would be staged but it would be interesting to see!

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

The idea that we all have an impact on the world, and other people, that we can never truly know.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

I’m just finishing off my next book, which is about a woman who can’t forget anything that happens to her, who meets a man that can’t remember anything.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: Print copy of THE INBETWEEN DAYS by Eva Woods

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you were in Rosie’s situation – reliving significant moments of your life – which moments would come back to you?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from The Inbetween Days:

Deep breaths, deep breaths. She tried to remember Maura’s advice from the time she’d cried in her annual appraisal. Daisy lacks confidence and that killer instinct we require in our partners. Perhaps she would be more suited to a support post. Her boss had watched her coolly across the desk, as Daisy sniffed and hiccupped. “Put your emotions aside, Daisy. Just bury them deep down.”
She tried to picture an empty pit, a spade beside it and a pile of soil, somewhere to shove these feelings in and forget about them, but it just made her think of gravesides, which brought up a lot of memories she really didn’t want to relive, and panic seized her once again, squeezing her insides in an iron fist. Rosie had been hit by a bus. A bus. One of those gigantic red double-decker ones, tall as a building.
She tried to make sense of what the doctor was saying, that composed young woman who was likely younger than Daisy herself. Rosie had been thrown up in the air, and landed and hit her head on the road, but luckily—luckily!—the accident had happened only yards from the hospital, and she’d been whisked into the emergency room as soon as was humanly possible. “She suffered a cardiac arrest on the way,” the doctor recited, as calm as a cold-caller trying to sell mobile phone insurance. “We were able to restart her heart and stabilize her, for now at least.”
Daisy grasped at the words, which seemed to slide out of her hands like bars of soap. “You mean…her heart stopped? She died?”
“Well, only technically.”
Daisy was stunned into silence. Dying, even if it was just for a few seconds and only technical, still seemed quite bad. A lot to deal with on a Tuesday morning when she’d been making her breakfast smoothie. Christ, she hadn’t washed the blender, Gary would go ballistic, and…
You sound just like Mum. That’s what Rosie would say. Daisy was obsessing over small details, unable to take in the huge ones. The blender, and its washed or unwashed state, was not important right now. She hadn’t even told Gary yet, just run out of the house with her shoes on the wrong feet. He’d left at six, as always, to get into the office and pick off the best clients before anyone else did. He had no idea Rosie was lying here, broken into bits with deep red scrapes all over her pale skin, her hair matted with dirt and blood and a patch of it shaved off, her leg in a cast. The machines around her, the tubes trailing out of her body. She was in a coma, the doctor had said. “Will she wake up?” Daisy asked. “Can she hear us?”
She saw the momentary pucker on the doctor’s smooth face. “We can’t be sure. I’m sorry.”
“So…what will happen?”
The doctor hesitated. “We have about three days before we have to take out the nasal and breathing tubes and put in something more permanent. Hopefully she’ll wake up in that time. If she doesn’t…well. There will be decisions to make.”
“What does that mean?”
“You should discuss it with your parents, Miss Cooke. Excuse me now. Doctor Agarwal?” And she went, ponytail swinging, accompanied with the more sympathetic-looking male doctor, who at least had a kind smile. Daisy was left alone with her comatose sister. Slowly, she approached her. Rosie’s face was blank, a tube hanging out of her mouth. Daisy reached out to touch her hand—it was cold and limp.
“Rosie?” she tried. “Can you hear me?” Nothing. Her sister seemed gone somehow. Not asleep, just not there anymore. The last words she’d said to her weighed heavy in Daisy’s mouth. You’re so selfish…
This was all crazy. It was almost ten, a time when she’d normally be crouched at her desk inputting numbers, or drinking her fifth coffee of the morning, or meeting with clients. Instead she was at her sister’s bedside, while outside other relatives sat around in various states of worry or boredom or fear, and across the screen of a silent TV, the gibberish-like subtitles on a property show informed them whether Gareth and Gwen from Swansea had made a profit on the four-bed semi they’d bought at auction. Nothing made sense.
Her phone buzzed—she was squeezing it tight in her hand, leaving smeary fingerprints on the screen. Mum. Arriving Paddington now. She would be here soon. It was a terrible thing, but for a moment Daisy was actually glad Rosie was in a coma. At least that way Rosie and their mother couldn’t get into yet another fight.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Rosie Cooke is “in between.” In between consciousness and oblivion. Life and death. And though some say that when you’re near death your entire life flashes before your eyes, Rosie can’t remember anything at all—not even how she ended up in a coma. At least not at first.

Then something strange starts to happen. Rosie finds herself revisiting scattered moments from her past: a beach vacation, a play rehearsal, the day her brother was born. But why these memories? And what do they mean?

As each piece of the puzzle comes into focus, Rosie struggles to face the picture of her life that forms. But with every look backward comes a glimpse of what might be: A relationship with her sister. The opportunity to pursue her passion. A second chance at love. And Rosie just might discover that she has much to live for.

With bighearted emotion and comic sensibility, The Inbetween Days is a life-affirming novel about the little choices that determine our fate and our ever-enduring hope for the future.

Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Eva Woods was born in Ireland but now resides in London and has published two women’s fiction novels with Mira UK and also writes crime fiction for Hodder UK as Claire McGowan. In addition to writing novels, she teaches creative writing and has written for Glamour, You magazine, the Guardian, the Dublin Herald, and more. Something like Happy marked her North American debut.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | GoodReads |