Undressing Stone

By Hazel Manuel

Introverted and emotionally aloof, Sian can’t remember what her ex-husband had been talking about, but not wanting to do as he said, she did exactly what he’d cautioned against instead. From Cardiff to Saint Vay — a four-house hamlet tucked away in a forgotten corner of ancient France — Sian gives up her stable home and job in Wales to begin a new life in a borrowed cottage, because the internet told her to.
Undressing Stone is a mysterious tale flirting with the gothic as it interweaves Sian’s conversations with her psychiatrist with her newly reclusive life in France. There she meets Clotilde — a strange and enigmatic sculptor who likes to work in the nude. And Sian takes with her a secret she has told no-one — not even her psychiatrist. Will her encounters with Clotilde encourage her to admit a truth she has avoided for years? And what are the consequences for Sian if she does? In a narrative that moves between caustic observation and the richly sensual, this is a novel that challenges many of our assumptions about modern life and celebrates the unconventional. A beautifully paced, told with literary skill, but always compelling novel from Hazel Manuel, author of Kanyakumari and The Geranium Woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cinnamon Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788640329

Hazel Manuel

Hazel Manuel is a UK born novelist who began writing after a career in education, first as a teacher/lecturer and, later, as a business leader within the education sector. She now lives and writes in Paris where she hosts "Paris Writers Working Lunches". Hazel's first novel, Kanyakumari was written over three trips to India and was the winner of the 2013 Cinnamon Press Novel award. Her second novel The Geranium Woman was published in 2016 by Cinnamon Press. She is currently working on a psychological thriller, Cliff. You can find out more about Hazel and her work at www.hazelmanuel.net. It is important to Hazel to discover and explore that which she finds authentic in herself, in other people and in the ideas which inform the ways in which we live our lives and it is this search for authenticity that characterises her novels. What Hazel hopes to achieve through themes of uncertainty, loss, obsession, power, change, fear, and of questioning life and the self, is that the reader travels with her characters through an archetypical inner journey that is fundamentally satisfying because it could equally be their own.