Fly or Fall

FLY OR FALL Will the Allure of the unknown ever overcome the fear of stepping away from solid ground? When there's a surprise improvement in the family's fortunes and her husband urges a move away from London, Nell struggles to justify her resistance to these changes. How to explain her fear and the presentiment of some unknowable disaster? Nell feels cast adrift, far from home, friends and everything familiar. Trevor is unrecognisable as the man she married; their twins, Jonathan and Juliet, are grumpy and difficult. The new house is a building site and she's unsettled by Patrick, one of the builders, who's notorious as a womaniser. But he makes no pass at her. New friends, Kate and Fliss, are preoccupied with appearances and extra -marital adventures. The health club, where Nell takes a bar job, is a hotbed of flirtation and gossip. Though Nell distances herself at first, she's flattered by the attentions of a beautiful and enigmatic young man called Angel. When the romantic fantasy becomes fact, she feels guilty and triumphant. She wants to unburden to another friend, the quirky, new-age Elizabeth, but..... The foreshadowed disaster - felt as a tremor at the start of the story - rumbles into a full blown earthquake. When the dust settles, nothing is as it previously seemed. The love which blossoms unexpectedly from the wreckage has no future, and shocking truths about her friends, her husband, both her teenage twins and even herself, are exposed. Fly or Fall follows the dismantling of all Nell's certainties, her preconceptions and her moral code, and the future, for the woman who feared change, is irrevocably altered. But has she been broken or has she transformed herself?

About the Author :
Influenced by her sister, Gilli started to write in childhood - a hobby pursued throughout her teenage. Writing was only abandoned when she left home and real-life took over from the fiction. She did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but at sixteen - with the minimum qualifications necessary - went to Croydon (its art college). Gilli did not work on any of the broadsheets, in TV, or in publishing. Instead she did a variety of jobs - shop assistant, beauty-consultant, barmaid and picking up American tourists in London, in order to sell them real estate in Florida. She worked longest and most happily as a commercial artist. Gilli married Geoffrey, and when their son, Tom, was a toddler she resumed writing. The first full-length novel she ever completed, Just Before Dawn, was quickly picked up by a small independent publisher. Her second, Desires & Dreams, was published within a year of the first. Sadly the publisher failed to achieve the marketing push and wide distribution necessary to ensure success for its writers, or for itself. It ceased to trade within five years of establishment. Gilli's novels are unconventional, surprising and subversive. Although she writes under the banner of contemporary women's fiction, she is incapable of following a bandwagon. There will always be a love story at the heart of every story, but it will never be one of those join-the-dots plots. Her novel, TORN, first came out as an ebook in 2011. LIFE CLASS came out in 2012. FLY or FALL in 2013. All are now available in paperback. Gilli has been a school governor, a contributor to local newspapers and a driving force behind the successful establishment of a community shop in the village where she lives with her husband. Still a keen artist she draws and paints, design the family's annual Christmas card and accepts art commissions. In 2013 Gilli undertook the illustrations for the children's book, THE TALE OF KING HARALD - THE LAST VIKING ADVENTURE, written by her son, Thomas J T Williams, and published by The British Museum Press, in March, 2014.