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LIFE CLASS
Life hasn’t lived up to their expectations. Love has let them down. But art has
brought them together. And it’s never too late to learn lessons.
Four very different individuals meet once a week to draw the human figure. They each come to realise that it’s not just the naked model they need to examine and understand. They all have to secrets they hide from the world and from themselves. They each need to uncover and confront the past before they can make sense of the present and, ultimately, navigate a new path into the future.
Dory says she “works in the sex trade - the clean-up end”. She deals with the damage sex can cause. Her job has given her a jaundiced view of men, an attitude confirmed by the disintegration of her own relationship. Now that she needs to make a fresh start love doesn’t figure in her plans.
Stefan is a single-minded sculptor who can’t make a living from his art. To make ends meet he finds himself facing a class of adults who want their old teacher back. Love is an emotion he long ago shut off, but it creeps up from more than one direction. Is it time to admit that letting people into his life is not defeat?
Fran is a wife and stay-at-home mother on a collision course with her mid-life crisis. She craves the romance of her youth. An on-line flirtation becomes scarily obsessive, putting everything she really loves at risk.
Dominic is a damaged child, he knows all about sex but nothing about love. He has been given a different vision of the future but his lifestyle still holds a dangerous allure. By grasping the help and love that’s on offer he has the chance to transform his life.
Links to purchase LIFE CLASS
Meet Gilli Allan
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Author Bio:
I was born and brought up in Kent, in the South East of England. Influenced by my teenage
sister, who had decided to write a regency romance, I began my own novel when I was ten.
It was a hobby I continued to pursue throughout my own teenage years. Writing was only
abandoned when I left home and real life took over from the fiction.
I did not go to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, after leaving school at sixteen with just enough
in the way of qualifications to get in, I went to Croydon Art College, in south London.
I did not work on any of the quality newspapers, in television or publishing, but did a variety
of jobs - shop assistant, beauty-consultant and barmaid. I also had a job which consisted
of picking up American tourists and sending them on a free guided-tour of London which
culminated in lunch at the Hilton. The unsuspecting tourists were then subjected to an
intense sales-pitch, selling Florida real estate. I was no good at this ‘commission only’ job
and, unsurprisingly, didn’t enjoy it. I was very relieved when I eventually landed the job of
my dreams, working as an illustrator with an advertising design studio. I eventually went
free-lance.
I married and resumed writing while my son, Tom, was a toddler. My first two completed
novels, Just Before Dawn and Desires & Dreams, were immediately taken on by a new,
small publisher. But my publisher failed to achieve the required marketing push and wide
distribution which would have given its authors, and itself, any real prospect of success.
Though they were available in libraries, I never saw my novels in any book shop, other than
in my home town. The publisher ceased to trade within a few years.
I have continued to write what I have always written - unconventional, subversive and
surprising stories, which never follow the current band-wagon. Although my books -
contemporary women’s romantic fiction - always have a love story at their core, they DO
NOT have predictable, join-the-dots-plots. But I have failed to find a new mainstream
publisher and decided to go independent, publishing TORN and then LIFE CLASS, first as
eBooks and subsequently in paperback. Later this year I propose to publish my book, FLY
or FALL.
Still a keen artist I design my own covers. I also draw and paint, design Christmas cards,
and regularly attend a weekly art class. I’ve been a school governor, a contributor to local
newspapers and was one of the initiators of the successful community shop in my village.
Connect with Gilli:
Blog: http://gilliallan.blogspot.com
Author page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
Author page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/
