The Guardian Angel by Liam Livings
Release date 27th November 2015
Publisher: Love Lane Books
Cover Art by Meredith Russell
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Welcome, Liam, to Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words. We’re happy to have you here today. Tell us something romantic, about yourself and for our readers. I know that plays a part in your story.
Best place for a first date?
To Paris, under the Eiffel Tower. Have I been on a date there? Yes I have. Was it my first date? Strictly speaking no. I think Paris is such a romantic city. In The Guardian Angel, Richard has a few romantic escapes although one of them doesn’t turn out to be as romantic as he’d thought, but I won’t say any more or I’ll spoil the story.
Best night out you’ve had?
You know when you have one of those nights when the gods, or your guardian angel or whoever you believe in, is smiling down on you, when everything comes together to make a perfect night? Well, one night a few years ago, a friend had come to London from up’t North and we were going to have a quiet night in – Ab Fab box set, few bottles of wine, Chinese takeaway, you know. But once we got to eight o’clock we realised it was a bit of a waste for this friend to come all the way from Yorkshire / Derbyshire / Lancashire, wherever it was, down to London to only see the inside of the flat. So we jumped on the tube, went to a club called Fiction – used to be around the back of Kings Cross station, has since been pulled down to make way for a block of penthouses – which was a series of brick arches, converted into a night club. We got straight in, my friend charmed the doorman, as usual, deposited our coats and within minutes were in one of the dance floors throwing shapes and having it large with the rest of ’em. We met other clubbing friends once inside, having managed to whip up a Saturday night from thin air and a few hours’ notice; much hugging and dancing and sitting putting the world to rights and philosophising occurred. The club had an outdoor area and I talked to a group of lovely random people over cigarettes and philosophical life talk. We stayed right to the end, at 6 o’clock the next morning, dancing until our limbs ached, catching up about the last time since this friend had visited London and sitting to rest our sore feet. There was an enormous queue for the taxi rank and at that time of the morning all we wanted was a comfy sofa in the flat. Somehow, as we approached the queue a taxi appeared next to a man with a clip board and we were whisked into the car and thence back to the flat. That taxi journey will go down as the most ridiculous, rude, hilarious and surreal journey I’ve ever been on. Because we were all a bit the worse for wear from the club, we were in a jokey mood. I won’t go into details for fear of offending sensitive readers, but suffice it to say our jokes veered more towards the blue end of the scale and when one of my friends apologised to the taxi driver who’d been huffing and puffing at us, I replied, ‘No you’re not, you’re not sorry at all.’ To which he turned to the taxi driver and said, ‘He’s right you know,’ and promptly started telling the next filthy story. At the time, The Last King of Scotland was at the cinema, and we were discussing how sexy James McAvoy the male lead is, and then there we started to play on the name of the film, twisting and turning it until it was much ruder and didn’t make any sense at all. As you can imagine, at the time we thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world.
Richard has a few ‘memorable nights’ resulting in a lot more than an x rated taxi journey and some laughs. He’s definitely searching for something in his life, but sometimes it’s not clear where you have to search, and whether what you’re looking for is what you actually want or need. These are things Richard is grappling with during The Guardian Angel.
Most romantic thing someone’s done for you?
It probably will sound very pedestrian, but a few years ago, when I was saving up for my Mazda MX5, I had stopped buying any non essentials – no clothes, no music, films, books anything. Because Himself knew I was near to my saving target the Christmas before he bought me a Liam care package: most of the music, films, books and toiletries I had wanted over the previous 2 years of saving frantically, and hadn’t bought myself.
Richard doesn’t have much experience of romance as he’s not really done relationships before. He’s less moonlight and roses and more hook up app and takeaway with a friend; until he meets someone he wants to be in a relationship with
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Blurb
What happens when a man falls in love with his guardian angel?
Richard Sullivan is plagued by white feathers turning up at the oddest moments. Amy, his best friend, suggests his guardian angel is trying to contact him, but he dismisses the idea out of hand as nonsense.
Until, that is, he meets Sky. Six feet of muscle in a man skirt with white feather wings.
What exactly is a guardian angel? And what happens when your guardian angel takes leave and sends in a temp to cover? Do you wait for a perfect boyfriend on the off chance you may be able to touch him, to be with him, or do you grab happiness with another human? And, why the hell has Richard’s life suddenly become so complicated?
Excerpt
It all started on my way back from the wrong job. I’d just turned it down because I couldn’t stand to listen to that lot going on about sustainability this and putting bees on the roofs of houses that. I just wanted them all to fuck off. I didn’t need their job offer. I had a good feeling the law firm application would get me onto their graduate scheme. I knew it. I could feel it in my water.
The law firm sent me a letter thanking me for the application. And good luck with my other job searching.
Fuck it.
I returned to the office just west of Liverpool Street station to do my last week of temping—my last week temping there, after a long series of temping jobs, some of which had made me want to jump under the train some mornings, others I could just sail through with my brain in neutral. And now this one. Well, this one was fine.
It had been fine. At first I thought it was quite interesting to try to do what New York City had done with its unloved, unknown areas, and name them. Like their SoHo was the area south of Houston Street. TriBeCa was the Triangle Below Canal Street. All this was interesting and news to me when I’d started at the Between Town Partnership. They were trying to make the area between the City of London, Liverpool Street, and the West End, happen. At the moment it was a sort of nowhere between the proper shopping of the West End and the financial district—a sort of no man’s land. No one had reason to go there specifically, unless they worked there, as I had for a variable three months.
I turned on my PC, went to the kitchen to make myself an instant coffee, but not Nescafé because they were doing something nasty about bottle-feeding in Third World countries. I had listened at the time, a bit, but had just internally rolled my eyes. No, this was all free-range, organic, preloved coffee. Shame it still tasted of shit, though.
I sat at my PC and noticed a white feather next to the mouse. I picked it up, looked at it closely, noticing it was pretty perfect as far as feathers went, and then threw it in the bin.
The morning passed without incident: spreadsheets about the CO2 output of various buildings, some brainstorming for this new area, and another offer of an extension to my contract.
“I’ll think about it, thanks,” I said, folding the offer letter into my bag and leaving for lunch.
I sat on a bench in a little park. The grass was covered in office workers, each eating their lunch and grabbing some air and sun for a moment in their day. I pulled out the offer letter from my bag, and another perfect white feather fell into my lap. This one was a bit larger—as big as my index finger—and still perfectly white, still not bent or dirty. I folded it back with the offer letter, then rang Amy at work. She’d know what to do.
“Good morning, The Music and Video Shop, how can I help you?”
“It’s me. How’s your morning?”
She swapped her phone voice for her proper, slightly Welsh accent. “Busy as it goes. I can’t believe people still actually come into a shop to buy this stuff.”
“Just be thankful they’re trying to close down Pirate Cove. And there’s plenty of people who don’t know how to use it anyway, playing it safe, buying DVDs and CDs from you lot.” I paused, thinking about my morning, my situation, and the feathers; she’d want to hear about those. “So, white feathers, what do they mean?”
About the Author
About Liam Livings
Liam Livings lives where east London ends and becomes Essex. He shares his house with his boyfriend and cat. He enjoys baking, cooking, classic cars and socialising with friends. He escapes from real life with a guilty pleasure book, cries at a sad, funny and camp film – and he’s been known to watch an awful lot of Gilmore Girls in the name of writing ‘research’.
He has written since he was a teenager, started writing with the hope of publication in 2011. His writing focuses on friendships, British humour, romance with plenty of sparkle.
You can connect with Liam
Giveaway
Win a $15 Giftcard from Amazon or ARe, plus 2 further prizes of an ebook from Liam’s catalogue. Competition closes 11th December – midnight GMT. Must be 18 years of age or older to enter. Link and prize provided by the author and Love Lane Books.
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Dragons, vampires, werewolves, fae, witches and one very confused human.
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