BooksChatter: ☀☄ Dark Sleepers: Dark Flows the River Trilogy [1]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Dark Sleepers, a Young Adult Magical Realism Paranormal by Kate Sermon (first published 31 March 2013, this second edition 14 August 2016, Kate Sermon, 303 pages).

This is the first book in the Dark Flows the River Trilogy.

Don't miss our interview with author Kate Sermon.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first four chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Dark Sleepers is FREE on Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owner's Lending Library.

Author Kate Sermon will be awarding five Kindle copies to randomly drawn winners via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Trailer & | Teaser | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

“You are astral travellers now. Able to project your spirit out of your body at will and enter the realms. You are not the only ones. Some people come here in their dreams without even knowing it. Some purposefully decide to travel here to find answers to questions they can’t find on earth... And some pass over... Die.”

Kezia's world implodes when her dad dies. She starts to fall apart, but then she discovers the ability to leave her body. She drags her best friend, Ben, with her into other worlds to find her dad, but what she finds along the way, she could never have been prepared for...

Teaser: Excerpt

ONE

Kezia was fourteen when she watched her dad die. He always drove too fast – speeding across the open moorland as if his open-top convertible was as safe as an armoured tank. She sat in the passenger seat, loving the feeling of flying as the wind blew her hair back from her face. From here she could breathe in the smell of the sheep-chewed grass. She savoured it – it mingled in her nostrils with the more elusive tang of fear and excitement.

The scent of peat bogs and Dartmoor ponies forever merged in her memory with the bitter aftertaste of burning rubber. But most prominent of all was the smell of her dad as he sat behind the wheel, laughing at her squeals as he rounded bend after bend faster and faster. His aroma would always be the fragrance of her childhood – a mixture of cigar smoke, wood smoke and… what was it? In essence, it couldn’t be anything else but the very scent of life to her. Her home.

“Dad, go faster,” she pleaded. Her knuckles blanched white as she gripped both sides of the bucket seat.

And he did. He did anything she asked him.

The day he died started like any other. Nothing remarkable really except, maybe, a fleeting flicker of unease as she reached for the door handle of his red, vintage sports car. Later, she would remember this brief sensation and suppose that it might be a premonition but at the time she felt only her anticipation.

This was her favourite time of the day: uninterrupted time with her dad. He allowed himself this early morning drive as a way to ‘loosen the ghosts’ as he put it, a pathway into whatever he was writing at the time. And he wanted her with him.

This morning was no different. It was spring, April to be exact. A damp chill was suspended in the air. The mist, at this time of year, always hung around like a friend who stays too long after a party. A hazy pre-dawn glow filled the sky, framing the ancient woodland next to the house.

Kezia loved her home and every morning, while waiting for Dad to finish breakfast, she’d stand silently in the same spot and listen to the birds singing their very own beginning.

From here, outside the cottage, she could smell the dewy bluebells that shared the borders with the weeds. Their combined fragrance held firm to the mist and with each breath the familiar balloon inflated in her chest. How else to describe this feeling of pure happiness? She glanced up and saw that her dad was smiling at her from the other side of the car with that look on his face.

“Huh?” she muttered, still lost in thought.

“What are you waiting for, little one?” the question pulled her from her thoughts.

“Nothing,” she answered returning his smile, “let’s go.”

Dark Sleepers
Available NOW!

About the Author

Kate lives with her family and other animals in Devon halfway between Dartmoor and the sea.

She's done a bit of journalism; writes a bit of poetry; has published some short stories, teaches creative writing, and is currently ensconced in a MA Creative Writing. Alongside, she's writing the second book in the series.

As a teenager Kate traipsed the moor imagining herself in some version of Wuthering Heights. Nothing much has changed.

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