My guest today is Kindle no 1 bestselling author Laura Pearson. Laura is going to talk to us about her writing journey, and her latest book. So grab yourself a cuppa, get cosy and let’s get chatting to Laura.
Laura Pearson is the author of seven novels. The Last List of Mabel Beaumont was a Kindle number one bestseller in the UK and a top ten bestseller in the US. Laura lives in Leicestershire, England, with her husband, their two children, and a cat who likes to lie on her keyboard while she tries to write.
Welcome to my blog, Laura. Your books have had fabulous success. Can you tell your readers about your writing journey?
Thanks for inviting me over, Karen. My seventh novel, The Many Futures of Maddy Hart, is out on the 4th February with Boldwood Books. It feels quite strange to say that, because I’ve had books coming out thick and fast the past couple of years after a few years of nothing. I keep a stack of my finished novels right next to my laptop to remind myself of what I’ve achieved.
I finished writing my first novel, Nobody’s Wife, in 2010, and I managed to secure an agent but on the basis of her helping me with my next novel, which she liked the idea for, rather than editing and submitting my first one. I said a tearful goodbye to Nobody’s Wife, about two sisters who fall in love with the same man, and wrote Missing Pieces, about a family in the aftermath of the loss of a child. A couple of years later, we went out on submission with Missing Pieces and it didn’t sell. I said a tearful goodbye to that one too. The next novel I wrote was quite raw. I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer during my second pregnancy and I wrote a book from the perspective of a young mother who’s dying of cancer and leaving letters for the daughter she won’t see grow up. It’s called I Wanted You To Know.
In 2017, my fortunes changed when I sent Missing Pieces out to some small publishers and one of them, Agora Books, offered me a three-book deal for the three novels I’d written so far. Over the next eighteen months, all three books were published and I was overjoyed. I got to have a launch party, hold a proof and then a finished copy, and stick photos of my book cover on cupcakes.
Once that three-book deal was over, however, things got a bit tricky again. I wrote two further novels that went out on submission and didn’t sell, and one that didn’t even make it to submission. And then I wrote The Last List of Mabel Beaumont, which is about an 86-year-old widow who’s searching for the best friend she hasn’t seen for decades. I wrote it from scratch three times before I was happy with it, and then I managed to secure a new agent and new publisher. It came out in August 2023 and has sold more than quarter of a million copies and got to number one in the UK Kindle chart, all of which was way beyond my expectations.
Since then, Boldwood have republished my backlist and published two other new books, The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up, about a woman piecing her life back together after being pushed down the stairs by her husband, and The Beforelife of Eliza Valentine, about a group of potential siblings who exist before birth and are fighting to be born. The Many Futures of Maddy Hart, which comes out next week, is about a woman who jumps ten years into the future when she has sex. In total, my Boldwood books have sold over half a million copies. Which is incredible considering that at points I thought I might never be published again.
I’m currently in an eight-book contract, delivering two a year, so there’s lots more to come from me in the next few years.
What a fantastic writing journey, Laura. I loved The Last List of Mabel Beaumont and The Beforelife of Eliza Valentine. All your other books sound fab too. Congratulations and wishing you lots more writing success in the future.
Laura’s Latest Book:
The No.1 bestselling author of The Last List of Mabel Beaumont is back with a BRAND NEW story about love, heartbreak and finding forever.
Suddenly Maddy is right there… in her own future. And it’s all wrong, yet again.
It happens to her every time. When the kisses lead to the bedroom, just when she thinks she might have found the one… Just for a split second, Maddy disappears, and she finds that she’s living her own life. But ten years from now.
She’s only there for a little while. But each time, it’s long enough to know that she doesn’t want to be any of those versions of Maddy. Because every man she falls for seems to lead her to a life that is just… wrong.
Until she meets Oliver. And the vision of what lies ahead for them is happy. A little girl runs around, her braids flying behind her, giggling about how she wants sausages for dinner. She has eyes just like Oliver’s.
There’s just one catch. If Maddy wants the life she’s seeing with Oliver, she realises she has to break his heart now…
Would you destroy your present if there’s a chance that it could give you the perfect future?
Perfect for fans of David Nicholls, Matt Haig, and The Husbands by Holly Gramazio. The most unmissable ‘what if?’ love story of the year!
Some of Laura’s other books:
The list he left had just one item on it. Or, at least, it did at first…
Mabel Beaumont’s husband Arthur loved lists. He’d leave them for her everywhere. ‘Remember: eggs, butter, sugar’. ‘I love you: today, tomorrow, always’.
But now Arthur is gone. He died: softly, gently, not making a fuss. But he’s still left her a list. This one has just one item on it though: ‘Find D’.
Mabel feels sure she knows what it means. She must track down her best friend Dot, who she hasn’t seen since the fateful day she left more than sixty years ago.
It seems impossible. She doesn’t even know if Dot’s still alive. Also, every person Mabel talks to seems to need help first, with missing husbands, daughters, parents. Mabel finds her list is just getting longer, and she’s still no closer to finding Dot.
What she doesn’t know is that her list isn’t just about finding her old friend. And that if she can admit the secrets of the past, maybe she could even find happiness again…
What if there is life before we are born?
There are four of us: Samuel, Lucy, Thomas, and me – Eliza. And – if you’ve heard of the afterlife… well, we live in the beforelife.
We came into being the day Becca Valentine was born. We’ve been by her side ever since. What she doesn’t know yet, is that one day she might become our mother.
Then two men come into her life. Both seeking her heart. And then we realise: everything rests on Becca’s love story. Because one of the men is Lucy and Thomas’s father. And the other is mine and Samuel’s. And there’s simply no way we can all be born.
We all want her to make the right choice. We all want to be born. To hold her hand one day. To feel her stroke our hair. To call her our mother.
Then we discover there is something we can do. We can change Fate. But we only have a single chance each. How would you make sure you were born? And what if doing that isn’t what’s best for the person you already love the most in the world – your mother?
Karen King 