The Woven Lie – Liz Harris | Blog Tour | Author Guest Post | #TheWovenLie #HistoricalFiction

The Woven Lie is Violet’s story
Suffolk, 1948

When Violet Hammond sees an advertisement for a manager to run a museum in a village outside Bury St Edmunds, she jumps at the chance of a job that sounds both different and a challenge.

For Dr Edward Russell, forced to resign from managing the museum owing to the increasing pressures on him as a doctor, the person to succeed him is obvious – the highly competent Gladys Wilson. After all, Gladys had worked at the museum for years and had run it on her own on many occasions.

But when Edward interviews Violet, he’s excited by her enthusiasm and ideas for modernising the museum and her vitality, and he finds himself offering her the position. With a smile on her face and the right words on her lips, Gladys assures Edward that she’ll support Violet as much as she can.

But Gladys has no intention of doing so. On the contrary, she wants Violet to be sacked as soon as possible. She has too much to lose if Violet stays.

My thanks to Rachel of Rachel’s Random Resources for the tour invite and to author Liz for providing a great guest post and pictures. The Woven Lie is the third standalone novel in the Three Sister’s series. Published by Heywood Press on 13 February 2025, it is available in ebook (including Kindle Unlimited) and paperback formats.

GUEST POST
by Liz Harris

And it’s tax deductible, too!

When writing a novel the author obviously has to decide from the outset where to set the book. There are a number of considerations to take into effect when making this decision, not least is the fact that one of the best forms of research is to go to the location in person. Distance, pressures on time and money, etc, mean that it’s not always possible to do so, and in such an event, the internet, museums and books are invaluable sources of information.

But if visiting a location is a possibility, choosing somewhere you can reach without too much difficulty, that you’d like to visit, with a history that interests you, is part of the fun of writing a book. And happily, costs incurred on research trips are tax deductible!

The four books I wrote before I started researching the Three Sisters series are set in Asia in the 1930s, during the time of the British Raj. Darjeeling Inheritance is set on three tea plantations, Cochin Fall in the palm-fringed coastal town of Cochin, Hanoi Spring in exotic Hanoi and Simla Mist in the summer capital of the British Raj. I was fortunate to spend a magical three weeks in India when planning the three books set in India, and the following year, I had a wonderful three weeks in Vietnam before writing Hanoi Spring. 

Before writing the Asian-set novels, I wrote the three books in the Linford series. The Dark Horizon took me to New York, The Flame Within to Waterfoot, the little mill town where my heroine was raised, and I went to Germany where I located much of The Lengthening Shadow. Walking along the streets where my characters would be walking was just amazing, and I learnt a mass of useful information from museums in the area, for example.

When I came to write the Three Sisters, of which The Woven Lie is the third, three research trips were once again on the cards. But this time, for two of the three books I didn’t need a passport, which was a novel experience after my destinations in the past few years.

First, I went to Jersey in order to research The Loose Thread. The material I found in the museums about the five years that the German Reich was on British soil, in control of the people, was invaluable.

When The Loose Thread had left my hands, I went to Brittany in France, to mediaeval Dinan, to research The Silken Knot. I was to find that it had never before been more important to see the terrain before embarking on the novel than it was for this book.

Before setting off, I’d studied the Dinan area in books, but none of them had given me any idea of how difficult it was to get from the river and Dinan port up to the little town of Dinan that sat at the top of the hill. I had planned to house my characters in the town.

It was the longest, steepest hill I’ve ever seen in my life! It was so difficult that there were stone benches all the way up both sides of the hill for people to rest as they climbed.

As I puffed my way to the top, sitting every few minutes, I knew that my original plan wouldn’t work. Even though people at that time would have been more used to the hill than I, it would still have constrained their movement in and out of the town and I knew that I’d have to rethink where I was going to locate the house in which Iris and Pierre lived.

Agonising about where to place Iris and Pierre, I gazed out of my hotel window, which was beside the River Rance and the small port of Dinan, and I saw the line of stone and half-timbered houses on the other side of the river. I had my location!

With the publication of The Woven Lie in February 2025, the Three Sisters series has come to an end, and I’m now working on the next book.

I’ve been drawn towards writing another book set in Asia. I haven’t actually been to my chosen location – yet!  But the title of the next book will tell you where I’m going in the spring – Jaipur Moon.

While I wait for it to be time for me to board a plane again, I shall fill in my tax returns with my tax-deductible trips.

Thank you for letting me talk to you today. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed having an excuse to look back at some of the photos I’ve taken of lovely destinations I’ve visited in the past.

Born in London, Liz Harris graduated from university with a Law degree, and then moved to California, where she led a varied life, from waitressing on Sunset Strip to working as secretary to the CEO of a large Japanese trading company.

 Six years later, she returned to London and completed a degree in English, after which she taught secondary school pupils, first in Berkshire, then in Cheshire and finally in Oxfordshire.

 In addition to the twenty-one novels she’s had published since her debut novel The Road Back, Liz has had several short stories in anthologies and magazines.

Liz lives in Windsor, Berkshire. An active member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Historical Novel Society, her interests are travel, the theatre, reading and cryptic crosswords.

 Author Links: Website | X | Facebook | Insta | BlueSky | AmazonUK

Purchase Link – mybook.to/TheWovenLie