10 Interesting Facts About Shaun Deeley

I’m thrilled to welcome Canadian author Winona Kent to the Power of 10 series. Today, Winona shares ten interesting facts about Shaun Deeley, the protagonist in her latest release, In Loving Memory.

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1. He was born on 12 Nov 1791. When In Loving Memory takes place, in October 1940, he’s chronologically 148 years old. But since he leaped into Charlie’s time (the present) at the end of Persistence of Memory, his physical age is only 33. He’s a little bit younger than Charlie.

2. He’s fearless. If he wasn’t fearless, he would never have ended up in Charlie’s time. And he would never have been able to return to the night of October 14, 1940 to try and save Charlie from dying in the devastation caused by a bomb that destroyed Balham tube station.

3. He’s able to time travel at will. However he doesn’t quite realize it in In Loving Memory. And when he does understand how it works, he’s not very good at it (this kind of thing takes practice). In the bonus short story at the end of the novel, Easy When You Know How, he presents Charlie with a batiste nightgown, explaining that it’s French, and was worn by the Empress Josephine herself. Charlie asks whether he slipped into Napoleon’s chateau and stole it from her wardrobe. She’s joking, but in retrospect realizes it could be quite true.

4. He can play the piano. In the time that he came from, he often stepped in at the Annual Summer Ball when the regular pianist was too drunk to perform with the other musicians. In Persistence of Memory, in 1825, he plays a duet with Charlie on Sarah Foster’s pianoforte. after she teaches him FBI by The Shadows.

5. He met John Lennon in July 1964. You’ll have to read Easy When You Know How, the bonus short story included with In Loving Memory, to find out the details.

6. At the start of In Loving Memory, he and Charlie haven’t actually consummated their love affair, even though they’ve been sharing her cottage since he leaped into her life. By the end of the novel however…

7. His favourite clothes in the present are a pair of very worn jeans, an Italian cotton knit jumper, and light brown, scuffed boots, similar to the sort of boots he’d worn in 1825.

8. He knows how to knit. As he says in In Loving Memory – “I am not without my uses.”

9. He doesn’t mind having a bath in five inches of freezing cold water – and considers the constant hot water in Charlie’s cottage a curious luxury.

10. In 1825, he was the groom at Stoneford Manor. He’s rather fond of romps in the hay in a barn – in fact this may be how his son, Thaddeus Oliver Quinn, was conceived. But you’ll have to wait until the next novel, Marianne’s Memory, to read about his romp in the hay with Charlie!

Blurb

In this mesmerizing romance, a woman out of time falls in love with a man for whom time is running out.

“Kent combines time travel, mystery, and romance in a delightful sequel to Persistence of Memory that’s easily accessible for new readers.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review

In Winona Kent’s novel Persistence of Memory, Charlie Lowe, a young widow in Stoneford, England, was accidentally transported back to 1825, where she fell in love with Shaun Deeley, a groom employed at Stoneford Manor. They are only back in the present for seemingly a breath before a piece of wartime shrapnel sends them tumbling back through time to 1940, the height of the Blitz. There, they discover pieces of Charlie’s past that counter everything she thought she knew about herself.

Charlie and Shaun have decisions to make—do they interfere in time’s progress to save a man? Do they put their own future at risk by doing nothing? And how much time do these two lovers have left?

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Bio

WINONAKENT Winona Kent was born in London, England. She immigrated to Canada with her parents at age 3, and grew up in Saskatchewan, where she received her BA in English from the University of Regina. After settling in Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing. More recently, she received her diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School. Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. After a career that’s included freelance articles, long and short fiction, screenplays and TV scripts, Winona has now returned to her first love, novels. She currently lives in Vancouver and works as a Graduate Programs Assistant at the University of British Columbia.