To Be Someone - Tapa blanda

Helena Nicholls - ex world-famous pop star and prime-time DJ - wakes up in hospital to find her looks, her career and her personal life in tatters. She has been let down by her boyfriend, and the one person she loved most in the world - her best friend since the age of five - is dead. She feels that she belongs nowhere, and her sense of identity, fragile at the best of times, is in pieces. So Helena turns to the one thing that has always got her through, the one thing that has real resonance: music. And she begins to concoct The Plan. Using the request format that made her radio show so popular, where listeners rang in with detailed stories about why certain songs were so meaningful for them, she sets out the story of her own life, chapter by chapter, track by track. Thinking about the songs that represent important chapters in her own life, Helena begins to come to terms with her past. But the present is more of a problem as, while in hospital, she has remet an old friend to whom she is still hugely attracted. Her strict adherence to The Plan, however, means that time is not on her side. If she is to have a future at all, she must work out what it really means To Be Someone. With its wry, appealing narrative voice, and its insider's take on the world of pop music, To Be Someone is a stunningly mature first novel which swings with wide smoothness between past and present, child and adulthood, joy and tragedy, love, loss and the meaning of true friendship.

Louise Voss has been writing for the past seventeen years, with many twists and turns in her career. She started her publishing life with four novels for Transworld/Black Swan, the first of which, To Be Someone, was published in 2001 with its own CD soundtrack. To Be Someone was followed by three more contemporary women's fiction novels, Are You My Mother? Lifesaver, and Games People Play, until she switched to publishing thrillers with Mark Edwards in 2011. She and Mark were the first British indie authors to reach No.1 on the Amazon charts with Catch Your Death, where they stayed for the month of June 2011, with their novel Killing Cupid also at No. 2. This led to a four-book deal with Harper Collins. Her first solo thriller, The Venus Trap, was published by Thomas & Mercer in February 2015, and her sixth co-written novel with Mark, The Blissfully Dead, will be out later in the year, a sequel to the successful From The Cradle (the first in the DI Patrick Lennon series, both also published by Thomas & Mercer). Louise lives near Hampton Court and can be reached at @LouiseVoss1 on Twitter. She and Mark also have a very active Facebook page and love hearing from their readers: www.facebook.com/vossandedwards.