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Occasionally I’m lucky enough to go to my publisher’s offices and raise a glass with the publishing team to celebrate the release of a new book, and I’m always reminded of just how many people contribute to the complex process of getting my books into the hands of readers. I’m grateful for their collective enthusiasm, and for the care and attention they show, so thank you to team HQStories and HQN books. You’re the best.
I’m deeply grateful to be able to work with my brilliant editor Flo Nicoll, and also my agent Susan Ginsburg and the whole team at Writers House.
Writing a Christmas story usually extends well past the festive season, so thanks to my family for tolerating my mini Christmas tree well into March, and for only occasionally complaining when I make them watch a Christmas movie while everyone else is eating Easter eggs.
I’m grateful to my friends, writers and nonwriters, for occasionally making me live in the real world, not a fictional one.
My biggest thanks go to my readers, who continue to buy my books, send me supportive messages, and are so patient when I manage to film myself sideways on Facebook Live. I’m so lucky to have you. I hope this book makes you smile.
Love Sarah
x
Turn the page for a sneak peek of The Summer Seekers,
the delightful new book from
USA TODAY bestselling author Sarah Morgan!
Kathleen is eighty years old. After a run-in with an intruder, her children want her to move into a residential home. She’s not having any of it. What she craves—needs—is adventure.
Liza is drowning under the daily stress of family life. The last thing she needs is her mother jetting off on a wild holiday, making Liza dream of a solo summer of her own.
Martha is having a quarter-life crisis. Unemployed, unloved and uninspired, she just can’t get her life together. But she knows something has to change.
When Martha sees Kathleen’s advert for a driver and companion to take an epic road trip across America, she decides this job might be the answer to her prayers. She’s not the world’s best driver, but anything has to be better than living with her parents. Traveling with a stranger? No problem. It couldn’t be worse than living with her parents again. And anyway, how much trouble can one eighty-year-old woman be?
As these women embark on the journey of a lifetime, they all discover it’s never too late for adventure...
The Summer Seekers
by Sarah Morgan
1
Kathleen
It was the cup of semi-skimmed milk that saved her. That and the salty bacon she’d fried for her supper many hours earlier, which had left her mouth dry.
If she hadn’t been thirsty—if she’d still been upstairs, sleeping on the ridiculously expensive mattress that had been her eightieth birthday gift to herself—she wouldn’t have been alerted to danger.
As it was, she’d been standing in front of the fridge, the milk carton in one hand and the cup in the other, when she’d heard the sound of breaking glass. A faint shattering, brittle and out of place here in the leafy darkness of the English countryside, where the only sounds should have been the hoot of an owl and the occasional bleat of a sheep.
She put the glass down and turned her head, trying to locate the sound.
The moon sent a ghostly gleam across the kitchen and she was grateful she hadn’t felt the need to turn the light on. That gave her some advantage, surely?
She put the milk back and closed the fridge door quietly, because she was absolutely sure now that she was not alone in the house.
Moments earlier she’d been asleep. Not deeply asleep—that rarely happened these days—but drifting along on a tide of dreams. If anyone had told her when she was twenty that she’d still be dreaming of that affair when she was eighty she would have been less afraid of aging. And it was impossible to forget that she was aging.
People said she was marvelous, but most of the time she didn’t feel marvelous. The answers to her beloved crosswords floated just out of range. Names and faces refused to align at the right moment. She struggled to remember what she’d done the day before, although if she took herself back twenty years or more her mind was clear. And then there were the physical changes—her eyesight and hearing were still good, thankfully, but her joints hurt and her bones ached. Bending to feed the cat was a challenge. Climbing the stairs required more effort than she would have liked, and was always done with one hand on the rail just in case.
She’d never been the sort to live in a just in case sort of way, and it annoyed her that she was doing so now. This new cautious approach was partly because of her children. She’d never been an anxious person, but their anxiety had infected her.
Her daughter Liza wanted her to wear an alarm. One of those medical alert systems, with a button you could press in an emergency, but Kathleen refused. In her youth she’d traveled the world, before it was remotely fashionable to do so. She’d sacrificed safety for adventure without a second thought. Most days now she felt like a different person.
Losing friends didn’t help. One by one they fell by the wayside, taking with them shared memories of the past. A small part of her vanished with each loss. This is the person I was. It had taken decades for her to understand that loneliness wasn’t a lack of people in your life, but a lack of people who knew and understood you.
