Janet Denny lived in Udimore for thirty years and, with her husband, founded and ran Penny Royal in Rye High Street for a quarter of a century.
Now, with a new career as a writer, she has just won a national prize for her newly published book, The Man on the Mantlepiece. Janet was inspired to write it when she found the WW2 diaries begun by Jim, a working class South London boy of just eighteen. That young man became her father, but Janet knew him only as a photograph on the mantelpiece.
In the book, she follows him through his diaries, discovers who he was, learns about his deeply held beliefs and traces the course of a passionate love affair. Why didn’t Jim celebrate VE day seventy years ago? What happened the day before Janet’s birth to prevent her knowing the hero on the mantelpiece? To find out, why not read the book?
Available from the Rye Bookshop, from the publisher Silver Wood Books and from online retailers as a paperback and eBook. [Source: Silver Wood Books]