Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A modern day Romeo and Juliet type story that extends from Kent to Sri Lanka
Falling For You
What you need to know before your trail
Set over five days one Christmas.
18-yr old Rose is the sole carer for her disabled father so her own dreams of going to university, or even meeting someone and falling in love seem distant if not impossible. Living on a farm in rural Kent doesn’t offer many opportunities – and there is bad blood with the neighbours which goes back years.
But one day whilst on an errand, she gets caught in the snow and ends up having to take shelter. Someone else has also sought shelter from the elements. A paramedic who until recently has been working in war-torn Sri Lanka.
Two very different people, two very different stories. Can the ending be happy or tragic?
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Locations – the north downs in Kent and the village of West Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Most of the book takes place in snowy Kent where the two become stranded in a remote chapel.
Kent
The backstory leading up to their being stranded provides a history of two people with very different stories, sad and tragic in their own right. Rose is trapped on the family farm in Kent. A land dispute ended in their mother dying and her father was beaten one day in the nearby field leaving him severely injured. He promised his wife the farm would stay in the family and would not be sold to land developers. But the struggle to keep it is now telling…
Sri Lanka
Lawrence meanwhile is fighting his own battles in Sri Lanka. Trying to find the relatives of a young boy named Sunny who is all alone following the chaos in that country. The field hospital scenes are fraught with danger and heat exhaustion whilst the rains and the pace of work there is relentless.
In a nearby village – Katkulam where they go to search for the boys famly the legacy of war is all around – the parade of banana trees remind him of tall green soldiers lining up outside. The light is poor and Lawrence gets scared –
I started to make out strange shapes, dark and crooked amongst the foliage. they really scared the shit out of me. turned out they were the bombed out shells of houses that had got covered in jungle creepers.
Kent
Their shelter when they come together is a remote and desolate landscape where the snow reigns supreme causing them to take shelter in order to survive.
They take that shelter in a chapel where the snowdrifts then block them in. Lawrence tries to dig –
“I’m out shovelling snow.It’s a freezing, dull morning, uncannily still with a pea-souper of a fog on the hills. No faraway sounds of car or animals or people. No wind. No birds. I’d forgotten how quiet it can get up here..”
With only a small fire for company, the time they spend here is one of reflection, regret, honesty, lies and a gradual realisation that they are falling in love.
Their histories and backgrounds will determine what happens next.
Where Next?
