Tom Winter – författare

It started with a letter ... It''s hard for Carol to admit her failings. Unhappy in her marriage and with a teenage daughter who will barely converse with her, she feels trapped. So she puts pen to paper; well, it seems less daunting than airing her thoughts aloud. She isn''t expecting anyone to read her letters, so she doesn''t address them. Instead, she marks them with a smiley face and pops them in the post box. Albert''s retirement day at Royal Mail looms and he''s given one final task; organise the ''lost letters'' that have been piling up in a room behind the sorting machine. Amongst the letters addressed to Santa, he arrives at one with a smiley face drawn in place of an address. Albert opens the letter, unaware that in doing so his world would never be the same again.

Jack and Meredith are non-identical twins; the only similarity between them is their lives rapidly falling apart. Jack’s high-flying career in advertising has crashed and burned. Meredith’s world is also crumbling – a decomposing yogurt in her fridge now a symbol of her failed marriage. Her children, Jemima and Luke, offer little support, too consumed with the worlds of online dating and amateur taxidermy. All their lives, Jack and Meredith believed their father to be dead. One day, a throwaway comment leads Jack to question this, but with their mother fading ever-deeper into the grip of dementia, answers are hard to come by. As revelations start to untangle, the twins soon learn that what you seek is not always what you find…

''And in that instant, he knows in his heart that today is a momentous day; come what may, he and Alice will meet again, and life will never be the same.''Alice is stuck in an internship she loathes and a body she is forever trying to change.Ben, also in his early twenties, is still trying to find his place in the world.By chance they meet one day in a London park.Day 1Ben spots Alice sitting on a bench and feels compelled to speak to her. To his surprise, their connection is instant. But before numbers are exchanged, Alice is whisked off by her demanding boss. 20 minutes laterAlone in her office toilets, Alice looks at herself in the mirror and desperately searches for the beauty Ben could see in her. Meanwhile, having misunderstood a parting remark, Ben is already planning a trip to Glasgow where he believes Alice lives, not realising that they actually live barely ten miles apart.Over the next 31 days, Alice and Ben will discover that even if they never manage to find each other again, they have sparked a change in each other that will last a lifetime. In 31 Days of Wonder, Tom Winter shows us the magic of chance encounters and how one brief moment on a Thursday afternoon can change the rest of your life.

''A warm and uplifting read... a gentle and inspiring, yet vital, reminder that life is there to be lived, and that regrets won''t keep you warm as you age'' Justin Myers''Profound and joyful'' My Weekly''I loved this moving story about secrecy, shame and the healing power of vulnerability'' Daily MailNorman Cartwright, an eighty-six-year-old man living in the small seaside town of Clacton, Essex, has kept his cross-dressing a secret his entire life. A trucker by trade, his lipstick and wigs were donned only in the lonely confines of his lorry, as he sat in lay-bys and drove along empty roads on long trips away from his wife and children. After years of judgement, abuse and fear, Norman no longer knows how to embrace this side of himself, or if anyone would accept him if he did . . . When his teenage granddaughter, Florence, turns up unannounced, it''s obvious that she, too, has secrets she''s not yet willing to share. As they grow closer, however, the truth bubbles free and life starts to change in profound and unexpected ways, both for them and everyone around them.In Search of Ethel Cartwright is a moving story of family, love and courage that reminds us of the importance of being true to ourselves.