We’re very excited to be hosting the final extract in Headline’s blog serialisation of Jessica Ruston’s brand new book To Touch The Stars, and hope it certainly whets your appetite for this brilliant book! I will be reviewing the book this afternoon on the site, but for now, here is our exclusive extract from To Touch The Stars. To celebrate, Jessica’s publishers are giving away five signed copies, with one lucky winner getting a bottle of bubbly to enjoy with the book! For your chance to win answer this simple question:

What was the title of Jessica Ruston’s first novel?

Email answers to [email protected], or tweet answers to @publicitybooks

If you’ve missed any of the other extracts, you can find them here: Novelicious, Bookalicious Ramblings and Dot Scribbles.

“Cavalley’s is renowned for style, glamour and sophistication, providing the ultimate fashion indulgences for film stars and fashionistas. Violet Cavalley has poured her heart and soul into building her multimillion pound business and raising her three children. But Violet is not the woman she appears to be. And her adored children conceal secrets of their own. Behind the Cavalley family’s gilded façade lies a streak of darkness. Darkness that now threatens to destroy them all…

Violet lay in her hospital room. It was off the main corridor, and outside, she could hear trolleys being trundled past, and orderlies speaking to one another. There were a few chairs, a small table, some papers. A jug of water and a plastic rose in a little jar. The depressing contents that filled similar rooms all over the world, rooms where people waited, staring ahead with glazed eyes, just as she did now, waiting for news, hoping that the worst would never come, hoping that each sound of footsteps would not be the ones that brought their lives to a crossroads or a cul de sac. Half desperate for news, half wanting to put off for ever the moment that they feared most of all.

She stared down at her hands, resting on her lap, and thought how old they looked. When had they got like that? She didn’t remember. It had crept up on her sneakily, in the way aging did. One day you were sixteen and everything was ahead of you, and the next, you were… old. The sort of woman they called a doyenne rather than a protegee. A grandmother, a widow. Not that she had had to be old to be a widow. She raised her head. Her mouth was dry. Patrick sat by her side.

‘They’ll be here, soon enough,’ he said. ‘Everyone will be here.’

‘Flip?’ she asked, and her voice was unrecognisable. ‘I need to see Flip.’

Patrick’s eyes crinkled, and he shook his head. ‘No. I’m sorry, my darling. Not Flip. Shh, don’t cry. Don’t cry, lovely girl.’

And then later, as her children stood around her, the door opened and in walked Tillie. Her head was bruised, her face marred by a cut down one side, but she was otherwise unharmed.

‘Tillie.’ Violet swallowed. ‘Have you brought him? Have you brought Flip?’

Her children looked at one another, uncomfortably. Tillie turned to them. ‘Can we have a moment?’ she asked, then turned back to Violet, and gently took her hand, as Sebastian, Fran, Blue and Patrick left the room.

‘Soon,’ she said, softly. ‘Flip’s coming soon.’ Her voice was soothing. ‘Violet. I need to tell you some things.’

She pulled up a chair, and sat close to her mother-in-law, still holding her hand.

‘You’re not the only one who’s been keeping secrets,’ she said.

Violet’s eyes widened.

TO TOUCH THE STARS by Jessica Ruston, published by Headline Review in February 2011, £6.99″

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