Friday Feature: Colin Falconer’s Naked in Havana

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Why did I get Naked in Havana?
by Colin Falconer

Someone said to me recently: there’s always a love story in your novels. They said it as if that was a surprise.

Were they taken off guard because I’m a guy? Guys don’t do love stories, unless they’re Nicholas Sparks.

It’s true that in many commercial novels and Hollywood films written by guys, love is just the maguffin. The main character has a ‘love interest’, their reward at the end for saving the world and killing the villain. Instead of a medal, or a buried treasure, or a hardware voucher, they get a girl.

But there’s some best-selling fiction where love is much more than that – as it is in life.

You may have noticed this: for some, love seems easy. They marry childhood sweethearts. They stay married. There are only a few bumps along the way.

But some of us get wounded, or are already wounded to start with. Love is not the reward at the end; it’s a challenge of itself.

And some guys do write about it very well. Even famous guys.

Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms was a war story that was all about love: Catherine falls in love with Henry to distance herself from grief and Henry falls in love with her to forget about the war. Hemingway knew what he was about here, he had seen war up close and personal.

In the novel, love changes from a diversion to the fire that sustains them both. Loyalty to a lover becomes more important than loyalty to a cause and what starts out as a game of seduction becomes the real thing.

Or there’s the great Victor Hugo. People don’t think of him as a romantic novelist either, yet his best known novel, Les Miserables

naked, is, at its heart, a passionate love story.

You’ve seen the movie. You’ve gone to the show. Am I right or am I left?

They write about passion because passion changes us, and love is dangerous. It makes us reject our own sacred beliefs, turn our back on our own kind, to do the unthinkable. It can ask more of us than we might ever think to give; it can also heal us more than we ever imagined. And you never quite know which it will be until it is too late to turn back.

That’s why there is always a love story in my fiction.

That’s why passion is more than moonlight, more than boleros, and more than sex.

And that’s why when Reyes sees Magdalena in Havana in 1958 he knew that running guns in the middle of a revolution was the least of his troubles.


nakedTitle: Naked in Havana by Colin Falconer
Publisher: Cool Gus Publishing
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Length: 164 pages

Summary:

18 year old Magdalena Fuentes is lying naked next to her perfect lover when he tells her he is marrying someone else. It is soon clear her destiny lies with another man, even though she says she doesn’t believe in fate.
But fate doesn’t care whether we believe in it or not..
.

Havana, 1958. Magdalena Fuentes knows that Angel Macheda is the only man for her, even after he takes her virginity and then tells her he is engaged to someone else. She knows they are meant to be.

So why can she not stop thinking about Reyes Garcia? From the moment I saw you, he says, I knew there would be no one else.

From the moment I saw you, she tells him, I knew you were arrogant, conceited and rude.

Magdalena is a girl who will not let sentiment stand between her and love. But as Fidel Castro’s rebels tighten their grip around the city and she watches her family and her whole life come apart, she learns hard lessons about love abd about life.

Against the backdrop of the boleristas and the gangsters, the music and the guns, Magdalena discovers just how dangerous love can be.

Naked in Havana is the first in a three part series, a sprawling epic of passion and destiny, stretching across three decades and two continents.

Purchase Link: Amazon

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Author Bio

FalconerColin Falconer was born in North London, and spent most of his formative years at school playing football or looking out of the window wishing he was somewhere else.

After failing to make the grade as a professional football player, he spent much of his early years traveling, hitch-hiking around Europe and North Africa and then heading to Asia.

His experiences in Bangkok and India later inspired his thriller VENOM, which became a debut bestseller in the UK and his adventures in the jungles of the Golden Triangle of Burma and Laos were also filed away for later, the basis of his OPIUM series about the underworld drug trade.

He later moved to Australia and worked in advertising, before moving to Sydney where he freelanced for most of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines, as well as working in radio and television.

He has over 40 books in print. HAREM was an enormous bestseller in Germany and THE NAKED HUSBAND was only kept out of the number one spot in Australia by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. AZTEC stayed on the bestseller lists in Mexico for four months. He is a bestseller in Europe and his work has sold into translation in 23 countries around the world.

He travels regularly to research his novels and his quest for authenticity has led him to run with the bulls in Pamplona, pursue tornadoes across Oklahoma and black witches across Mexico, go cage shark diving in South Africa and get tear gassed in a riot in La Paz. He also completed a nine hundred kilometre walk of the camino in Spain.

He did not write for over five years following personal tragedy but returned to publishing in 2010 with the release of SILK ROAD and then STIGMATA. His historical novel ISABELLA was an Amazon bestseller last year.

His likens his fiction most closely to Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett – books with romance and high adventure, drawn from many periods of history.

His latest book is the romantic suspense, Naked in Havana.

Visit his website at www.colinfalconer.org.

Social Links: TWITTER | FACEBOOK | GOODREADS

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2 Comments

Filed under Friday Feature, Guest Blog

2 Responses to Friday Feature: Colin Falconer’s Naked in Havana

  1. Timitra

    Thanks for featuring this new to me author

  2. Cindy DeGraaff

    Nice interview. He sounds like a very interesting gentleman.