Single mum Jess has had her world turned upside down. Now it’s about to be turned inside out.

Jess has got a tough life back on track after love-of-her-life husband Simon walked out on her and their beautiful young daughters Katy and Abi. But she has long-time friend and confidante Polly to turn to…until Polly and Simon start having an affair together.

When Polly decides to apply for a job at Jess’s school, in the English department, Jess feels threatened. So why has Polly set her sights on the department head’s role? And why is the school now offering Jess a sideways ‘promotion’?

Jess can no longer trust anyone – including herself. Then out of the blue she is mysteriously sent a clipping for a temporary post in the Ministry of Education in Ghana, where she did a gap year as a teenager, and where she was happy. She is on the brink of losing everything at home but could this be a lifeline?

Julia Ibbotson’s Finding Jess is a passionate study of love and betrayal – and of one woman’s bid to reclaim her self-belief and trust after suffering great misfortune. It is a feel-good story of a woman’s strength and spirit rising above adversity.

The Excerpt

Chapter Twenty Three: the streets of Accra

There was an hour before she needed to be at the Ministry, so Jess grabbed her shoulder bag, locked the apartment, and ran down the stairs and out into the gardens. She breathed in the perfume of the tropical blossoms and the rain-washed soil, the tarmac steaming in the hot sun. Out on the street, the morning was already bustling with activity and noise: cars screeching and blaring their horns, women carrying shallow baskets on their heads laden with oranges and bananas, tomatoes and mangoes, moving gracefully and smoothly through the crowds of smart dark-suit-clad office workers scurrying towards their offices in centre of Accra.

Even in her pale pink shift dress, Jess felt dull amongst the bright jewel colours of the women’s Ghanaian cloth and turbans glowed in the sunshine. Plump and proud, market mammies swung through the noisy streets to set up their stalls, or to accost passing drivers with their wares, hoping to sell a few before the competition of the central market. Jess smiled at the babies swaddled on their mothers’ backs but they only blinked passively at her, their big glassy eyes fringed by long thick black eyelashes.

The open drains alongside the pavements were already stinking with rotten vegetables, the air thick with spices, putrefaction and melting tarmac. Jess felt nauseous. Even here in the city of Accra, children with the distended bellies of kwashiorkor, were washing in the drains and under the water spouts at the shop fronts. Little children with tattered tops and shorts, thin young men with crates of beer aloft, and scrawny chickens and goats mingled with the crowds on their way to work.

She could hear the strong beat of the high–life music issuing tinnily from the buildings as she passed, and, the backbeat of the drums. Was that the pulse of the kpanlogo djembe throbbing through her head or the words of the donde rising and falling, surging to a crescendo and softly falling away, like a migraine, surging and dying.

As she walked, Jess felt as though the crowds and the noise of the streets softened to an echo in the distance and she could only hear the voices of her daughters calling to her. She saw their loved faces, there across the busy street, and she stepped over the open drain and into the road to embrace them …

But she didn’t see the car, swerving towards her …

• Posted in: book launch ♦ Love Book Group Tours
• Tagged: Drumbeats Trilogy, Endeavour Media, Finding Jess, Julia Ibbotson, Love Books Group Tour