Rotten Peaches
by Lisa de Nikolits
on Tour February 1-28, 2019
Synopsis:
Rotten Peaches is a gripping epic filled with disturbing and unforgettable insights into the human condition. Love, lust, race and greed. How far will you go? Two women. Two men. One happy ending. It takes place in Canada, the U.S. and South Africa. Nature or nurture. South Africa, racism and old prejudices — these are hardly old topics but what happens when biological half-siblings meet with insidious intentions? Can their moral corruption be blamed on genetics — were they born rotten to begin with? And what happens when they meet up with more of their ilk? What further havoc can be wreaked, with devastating familial consequences?
“Wow. Just wow. Lisa de Nikolits’ Rotten Peaches blew me away. A dark, compulsive, and addictive story in which the characters’ secrets and needs conflict with each other and fold back in on themselves in an ever-tightening noose, Rotten Peaches will keep readers gripped until the very last page. Highly recommended!” —Karen Dionne, internationally bestselling author of The Marsh King’s Daughter
Book Details:
Genre: Noir Suspense Thriller
Published by: Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series
Publication Date: September 20th 2018
Number of Pages: 300
ISBN: 1771335297 (ISBN13: 9781771335294)
Purchase Links: Amazon | Inanna | Goodreads
Rotten Peaches Trailer:
Read an excerpt:
I am not a killer. I just fell in love with the wrong man. I went too far this time, and there’s no going back. There’s no going anywhere, period. I nearly stayed afloat, but my luck ran out. Luck, that mystical mythical glue that holds the shards of despair together and makes life navigable. But fragmented despair, that’s what sinks you.
It’s the middle of the day and the ghost of a cat walks across my bed. I am hidden in the downy softness of bleach-laundered sheets, sheets ironed with starch and cleansed of their filthy sins by scalding Catholic water.
The bed is high and wide and the pillows are like clouds ripped from a summer’s sky. I bury my head in cotton balls, puffy meringues and whipped cream, and try to ignore the ghost of the cat that is walking the length of my back.
The cat settles at my feet but it gets up again and pads along my legs. When it first started its prowl, I sat up and reached for it but, like all ghosts, it immediately vanished and waited for me to turn away before settling in a warm, heavy lump against my side. Its weight is comforting in a way, like being massaged by the hand of God, but it isn’t God. It can’t be,because God, like luck, has left the building of my life.
***
Excerpt from Rotten Peaches by Lisa de Nikolits. Copyright © 2018 by Lisa de Nikolits. Reproduced with permission from Lisa de Nikolits. All rights reserved.
Bonus Content!
In addition to Lisa’s amazing new thriller, she’s also released a new cookbook. To celebrate she’s sharing the recipe for one of the South African desserts mentioned in Rotten Peaches!
Download your copy today & start baking your way to a nourished body and spirit!
Click Here to Download Your Copy of Melk Tert Recipe
Author Bio:
Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has lived in Canada since 2000. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy and has lived in the U.S.A., Australia and Britain. Her seventh novel, No Fury Like That will be published in Italian, under the title Una furia dell’altro mondo, in 2019. Previous works include The Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa, A Glittering Chaos, Witchdoctor’s Bones; Between The Cracks She Fell and The Nearly Girl. Lisa lives and writes in Toronto and her very new book, Rotten Peaches is hot off the press to reader and literary acclaim. Lisa a member of the Sisters in Crime, Toronto Chapter, Sisters in Crime, Mesdames of Mayhem, The International Thriller Writers.
Q&A with Lisa de Nikolits
Which of your characters do you dislike the most and why?
That’s like asking a mother which of her children she dislikes the most! I love them all. A lot of them are pretty weird and they behave in self-destructive and morally reprehensible ways but that’s what makes them so interesting! One day, in the afterlife, I’d love to hold a banquet and invite every character I’ve ever written! All of them! Or maybe we’d rent out a resort in the Bahamas for a month and get to know each other!
Which of your character is the hardest to write and why? Leonie who was hard to write and she definitely took the most work. I think it’s because I thought she was perfectly formed in her first draft and it took the persistent nudging of a good friend to say hey, who is this gal? Once I started fleshing her out, I just loved working with her!
What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned through writing?
That you can work as hard as you like, be the hardest worker in the world and still, you may not be able to make your dreams comes true. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success and not even success guarantees success. I know a lot of really talented writer friends who’ve had bestselling novels and they’re struggling to find homes for their more recent books. It’s one of life’s assumptions that if you reach a certain point, that there will be no downhill from there but that’s so untrue! Which is why I love watching documentaries about movie stars or writers or musicians who peaked and then fell and then rose again and it was even sweeter the second time around. Also, you get to see how extremely hard those artists work, they practice every day, write every day, and they’re relentless in their comittment to their craft even when you’d think they’d be ready to sit on their laurels and enjoy doing not much of anything in the sunshine!
What has been your biggest challenge to your writing career
The biggest challenge is that I don’t write a straightforward, genre type of novel. Readers, booksellers, agents and publishers like books that neatly fit a slot and mine don’t do that! And if you mention the word ‘cross-genre’, people get suspicious. And the question, ‘who do you write like, or so what are your books about, or, tell me a book that’s similar to yours
What inspired you to write your first book?
I’ve tirelessly written books for the past thirty years! However, in the beginning, I didn’t actually realize what it meant, to write a book. I didn’t know anything about plot arcs or character development or strong dialogue or setting as character. I studied English Literature (with the goal of wanting to become a writer) but back in the day, we didn’t have creative writing courses. So I wrote long manuscripts that were awful streams of consciousness – terrible things!
The very first book I wrote was called Single Girls Go Mad Sooner and it was supposed to be a collaborative effort with an illustrator friend of mine. I would write anecdotes about dating (pre-Internet!) and she would illustrate these tales of disaster! This was in my early twenties. Then she bailed on me and I went ahead and wrote it anyway. It was, truly, one of the most poorly written collection of short stories to ever see the light of day but at least I tried! I always tell myself that, to not be disparaging of my early efforts because they all showed passion and commitment and the desire to do that which I really felt was my calling. Thankfully, there are no copies of Single Girls Go Mad Sooner out there and at one point I thought of rewriting it and I read it and shuddered! There wasn’t anything at all to salvage from it!
So really, the first book I sat down to really write in a proper way, was The Witchdoctor’s Bones, which was twelve years ago. By that time, I had attended conferences and workshops, I had read books on writing by the stack, I studied books in a different way, I dissected books to see how they had been written. I left my day job (madness!) and sat down and wrote The Witchdoctor’s Bones.
And one more note, clearly I hadn’t done my homework well enough because I wrote the book at 220 000 words! The average book length should be between 70-85 000 words! This resulted in many rejection letters and a lot of rewriting but the The Witchdoctor’s Bones made it into the world in 2014 and I was just delighted! I still love this book so very much
Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
I’d like to say, please give Rotten Peaches a try! I know some readers are more used to my more serio-comedic books, like The Nearly Girl and No Fury Like That but Rotten Peaches will give you a good read! It has a unique setting and story line and it’s a good, entertaining read! When I read a book, the thing I want most, is to escape into that world and I offer readers an escape!
Fun Questions:
Which actor/actress would you like to see playing the lead character from your most recent book?
I can see Charlize Theron as Bernice and Sandra Bullock as Leonie. Both are very strong women and would bring such power to the roles! And I’d love to see Sandra Bullock as the really nasty sociopathic, amoral Leonie.
Give us an interesting fun fact or a few about your book or series:
I tried to turn one aspect of Rotten Peaches into reality! In Rotten Peaches, Bernice is the author of self-help cookbooks and I thought this would be a hit in real life! So I got together with a wonderful therapist, Marilyn Riesz, and an extremely talented food editor, Gilean Watts, and we came up with Bake Your Way to Happiness. You can find it on Amazon (link below). Unfortunately this book did not fly in the way that I truly believed it would (and should!) but you never know, it’s day might still come – it really is a wonderful book and it got great reviews! https://amzn.to/2FhJjxe
Favorite foods?
My husband, Brad, made slow-cooked scalloped potatos with aged cheddar, garlic and parmesan cheese! That is definitely my most favourite thing in the world right now! Followed by birthday cake! Give me those two things in one meal and I’d be ecstatic!
Favorite activities?
Having a nap is definitely on the top of my charts! Talking to my cat, having a few good reads on the go at the same time, finding a fabulous new series to binge watch! I love finding a series with about eight episodes because that way you’re not going to lose your entire life for months but just a few hours! I’d love to watch Sons of Anarchy but with seven seasons and ten episodes (and actually I think there are more!), that’s 70 hours! Which is, I guess, two work weeks, so if I ever have a two week vacation and don’t know what to do with myself, I’ll do that! I love going for bike rides in summer and I also love exploring abandoned places! If there’s a hole in the fence, I’m in! Travel is high on my list too. If I won the lottery, Brad and I would travel the world, with the cat of course!
Catch Up With Lisa On:
lisadenikolitswriter.com, Goodreads, Twitter, & Facebook!
Lisa de Nikolits picture credit Richard Picton
Tour Participants:
