Contact: Suzi StembridgeMobile: 07710078146
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NOW AVAILABLE TWO QUARTETS OF HISTORICAL NOVELS WRITTEN BY SUZI STEMBRIDGE. (see below).
Suzi was born in Yorkshire, where she still lives with her husband Simon Stembridge. She was educated at Penrhos College, Colwyn Bay and whilst bringing up two children, Heidi and Oliver, graduated with the Open University.
She worked in the travel industry from leaving school to selling her business in 2004, which she had founded in the early eighties. Filoxenia Ltd was a Greek tour operation known for its tailor made holidays and personal service; as such many of its clients were eminent people seeking privacy and accommodation above the average. Her original travel company www.greco-file.com still exists to advise discerning travellers. It was the second of three businesses that Suzi founded; her first - Girl Friday - in the late 1960s could lay claim to being a PR company before the term was even coined.
One of Suzi’s first jobs was as an airhostess (the correct term in the 1960s!) in the days before mass tourism and when Crete only had a grass airstrip. It is therefore not surprising that since selling Filoxenia, to the group running Inntravel and Great Rail Journeys, she turned her hand to writing novels, nor that one should feature an air stewardess at this time – CAST A HOROSCOPE. A story of the time after the Berlin Airlift, the happy-go-lucky commercial airline pilots in a time before the onset of mass tourism, a story of childbirth out of wedlock, the horror of adoption and marriage as the only option for a decent middleclass girl.
Other works followed and Suzi has created a series – COMING OF AGE – which is now being published.
The historical series GREEK LETTERS is in four volumes, and it is true to call them as much a travel guide as a historical saga covering the 19th and 20th century. Starting from the dawn of the modern Greek state at the time of the Greek War of Independence and the hugely important Battle of Navarino in 1827 which halted the Ottoman advance on Western Europe, the first two volumes are a "Grand Tour" and embrace a dynasty to create a family saga. The ominous blackmail attempts which rattle through both centuries, lead in the second two volumes to an Edwardian childhood with some domestic detail, forest fire and the Olympic Games, together with a few of the recurring themes and are brought right up to the present day and the problems facing the western world.
The three main characters in the series take centre stage in different books, and each novel centres on a different storyline in a different decade. BRIGHT DAFFODIL YELLOW follows on from CAST A HOROSCOPE exploring the agonies of changing an identity in order to hide from past indiscretions at the time of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and which allows the protagonist to escape to the Lake District. There is an added dimension of Welshness into this book.
THE GLASS CLASS brings the main characters from the series together as the decades turn into the 1980s and then the 1990s and as the title implies shatters their comfy middleclass roots. Death, even murder and alcoholism stalk through their West Yorkshire inheritance and Wales and Greece again feature.
The final book is the most unusual. It focuses on Corfu and Athens during the dying days of the Colonels Junta in Greece, and in Yorkshire and Greenwich and this novel hovers between crime and thriller. The psychological pressure put upon the main protagonist by a doctor with a degree in law, clever enough to have been employed in the notorious prisons of the Junta, makes this novel not only the most spooky of the novels, but its backdrop of a family holiday on a beautiful Mediterranean island lulls the reader into a sense of false security. Lesbianism, homosexuality and particularly unpleasant psychological torture are beyond the understanding of the pre-teenager who solves the crime. To add mystery it is published anonymously under the pen name of one of main characters of the series.
TO READ THE HISTORICAL AND TRAVEL NOVELS ABOUT GREECE, WRITTEN BY SUZI STEMBRIDGE, you will need a KINDLE. However if you don't want the tablet you can download Kindle FREE to your PC, your Mac, your ipod or ipad as well as to many mobile phones. The first six volumes of GREEK LETTERS QUARTER and the COMING OF AGE series are already available and hopefully the final two volumes will be available by the end of April 2012. Currently these are priced from about £2.00 each.
Information about the Stembridge family’s current travel ventures can be found at www.greco-file.com and including a picture of their own house in the Eastern Peloponnese near Astros and Leonidion. And if anyone wants to buy this lovely house they have only to ask!
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