Today I am so pleased to welcome Fearne Hill to Joyfully Jay. Fearne has come to talk to us about her latest release, The Last of the Moussakas. Please join me in giving her a big welcome!

Thank you so much to Jay for allowing me one of the guest post slots to introduce myself. Ten things about me:

1. Fearne Hill is a pseudonym, because unfortunately there are some whacky people out there. The name comes from my favourite poem, Fern Hill, by the Welsh romantic poet, Dylan Thomas.
2. When I am not writing, I work as a hospital doctor, specifically I am an anaesthetist.
3. I live in the countryside near the English south coast but spend as much time as I can in France.
4. The Last Of The Moussakas is my first full length MM novel and is set on the beautiful Greek island of Aegina. Aegina has stayed hidden from mass tourism, so sshhh! The hotel on the port front, featuring in my book, actually exists and is indeed, for sale.
5. Writing is a relatively new pastime for me and one I wish I’d discovered earlier. My editor at NineStar Press, Elizabetta, is amazing and has taught me so much. I still have oodles to learn.
6. I have a trilogy coming out later this year, entitled Rossingley. It is based around a genderqueer, nightdress-wearing, 21st century earl called Lucien who owns a vast country estate, a mansion in Mayfair, and drinks his own body weight in Campari.
7. One of my favourite genres to read is historical MM, especially Joanna Chambers, Sally Malcolm and KJ Charles. I have a Regency England fetish. My favourite MM romance books ever are The Captive Prince trilogy and Alexis Hall’s Spires series.
8. Writing stories and putting them out there for readers to criticise is a scary business. It is human nature to focus on the negative and overlook the positive, in all walks of life. Why do we do this to ourselves?
9. My medical colleagues are flummoxed by my writing hobby. From an early age, medics only exercise the analytical, practical and scientific side of their brains. Re-finding my creative side is liberating.
10. I use the words ‘just and really’ too much in my writing. I’m working on it.

Excerpt

“I’d heard you were back,” I say neutrally, eyeing the lean, blond man slouched at one of the outside tables. His pale-blue shirt is rumpled and half undone, although he has clearly tried to rebutton it at some point and failed to align the buttons correctly. In one hand, he nurses a bottle of Fix lager and in the other a thin roll-up from which he takes a long drag before attempting to focus his blue gaze on me. I fold my arms across my apron.

“And if Papa Marcos sees you, he’ll tell you to get on your way; you’re not welcome here after what happened last time.”

Papa Marcos is actually my uncle, not my father, but that’s what everyone has called him for as long as I can remember. And this is his restaurant.

“Christ, that was ages ago, Georgios,” slurs the young man, shaking his head in mild protest. A wave of that thick yellow hair falls over his face with the movement, and he lazily pushes it aside before taking another swig from the bottle. He misjudges the precise location of his mouth and some of the amber liquid dribbles down his chin unnoticed. Ash from his cigarette falls unimpeded onto his jeans.

“Well, Papa Marcos has the memory of an elephant, and frankly, I don’t blame him if he tells you to bugger off. You’re lucky you’re even allowed back on the island, to be honest.”

The blond man regards me for a long second, his heavy-lidded gaze momentarily focussed. I feel a familiar lurch in my stomach, somewhere between pleasure and pain, and deliberately push it aside. Not tonight and not like this. Not ever again, in fact, I tell myself. I can’t continue tormenting myself like this, I just can’t. Picking up a tray, I gather empties from the table next to the man, aware of those blue eyes blearily following my every move as I cross to and fro around the outside restaurant area, clearing up the debris from departed diners.

Blurb

Max Bergmann is Europe’s hottest drum and bass DJ. From the outside, his life is a whirl of glamorous vodka-fueled parties and casual hook-ups, whilst inside he craves the one thing he can’t have – his Greek childhood friend, Georgios Manolas.

Following a disastrous PR stunt and one drunken hook-up too many, Max realises the time has come to reassess his life choices. Returning to his childhood home on the Greek island of Aegina, if he wants any chance of having Georgios permanently in his life, he has to delve into the mystery of the longstanding hatred of the Bergmann’s by Georgios’s family.

Georgios is a chef and has spent his whole life on the tiny Greek island of Aegina. He has held the family restaurant together since he left school, with very little reward, and dreams of one day running a restaurant of his own on the island. Yet if he acknowledges his feelings for Max, he runs the risk of losing not just his traditional Greek family but also his livelihood.

As Max slowly uncovers the secrets of the past, he is left wondering whether a little Greek girl’s heart-breaking wartime diary could not only hold the key to his family’s history, but could it also unlock his and Georgios’s future together?

The Last of the Moussakas is a light-hearted, warm romance about two men’s quest for the truth about the past and unlocking a path to a future together.

Buy link: Amazon

Bio

Fearne Hill lives deep in the southern British countryside with three untamed sons, varying numbers of hens, a few tortoises and a beautiful cocker spaniel.

When she is not overseeing her small menagerie, she enjoys writing contemporary romantic fiction. And when she is not doing either of those things, she is working as an anaesthesiologist.

Connect with Fearne at: https://linktr.ee/Fearne_Hill