Everything Happens for a Reason by Katie Allen #excerpt #EverythingHappensForAReason #RandomThingsTours #JubilantJune

Hi and welcome to FromBelgiumWithBookLove where it is my absolute pleasure to share with you an excerpt from Everything Happens for a Reason! My review can be found here if you want to have a look at that, but let me just tell you right here that I found Everything Happens for a Reason funny, sad and thought-provoking, and that it had all the suspense, thrills and twists I love and a bunch of characters I fell in love with to boot!

Many thanks to Anne Cater for having me on the tour, and to Orenda Books for the excerpt.

Let’s have a quick look at the blurb first:

Armed with one broken heart and a (borrowed) sausage dog, Rachel is on a mission to find out why her baby was born sleeping.
Because Everything Happens for a Reason…
Doesn’t it?
Mum-to-be Rachel did everything right, but it all went wrong. Her son, Luke, was stillborn and she finds herself on maternity leave without a baby, trying to make sense of her loss.
When a misguided well-wisher tells her that ‘everything happens for a reason’, she becomes obsessed with finding that reason, driven by grief and convinced that she is somehow to blame. She remembers that on the day she discovered her pregnancy, she’d stopped a man from jumping in front of a train, and she’s now certain that saving his life cost her the life of her son.
Desperate to find him, she enlists an unlikely ally in Lola, an Underground worker, and Lola’s seven-year-old daughter, and eventually tracks him down, with completely unexpected results…
Both a heart-wrenching portrait of grief and a gloriously uplifting and disarmingly funny story of a young woman’s determination, Everything Happens for a Reason is a bittersweet, life-affirming read and, quite simply, unforgettable.

Ready? Okay, here we go!

To: LRS_17@outlook.com
Thu 23/2, 00:52
SUBJECT: Early-onset old age
Slept an hour, up again. You get these guests – like E’s mother – who bring too much luggage, unpack into every available space and tell you what to buy in for their breakfasts (plural). That’s Everything Happens for a Reason. It’s on an open-ended stay and things will only resolve when one of us kills the other.
And the man from Oval’s here too. He’d been gone for months, there was no room for him. When I half close my eyes, he’s rolled up in a ball at the end of our bed, giant hands covering his face.

To: LRS_17@outlook.com
Thu 23/2, 12:16
SUBJECT: Lie in
Everything Happens for a Reason and I stayed up into the small hours, like the first evening that any houseguest arrives, when the enthusiasm is still genuine and there are easy things to say.
We thrashed things out over the ginger biscuits, washed down with raspberry leaf tea left over from your last week here – an effective show of courage from my side.
EHFAR, as it shall be known from now on, turns out to be a foreign visitor. If pushed, I would say Germano-French: brutally direct, yet exasperatingly philosophical. No time for ‘the flight was fine, thank you’, instead it’s straight in with, ‘why do you act like I don’t exist?’, ‘you can’t resist me’, ‘you know what you did.’
It’s a sign of a weak mind, writing down your problems to ‘work them through’ – kind of thing Tina in Coaching recommends. But making a list was the only way to keep EHFAR from delivering all its blows at once. You don’t need to see it all but it was something like this:
The reason?
• Glass of wine at lunch
• Blue cheese in salad dressing
• E
• Dangerous mother
• Impending nuclear holocaust
• Disabled
And yes, when we get the post-mortem we can definitively cross off the first, maybe the second and probably the last one. (For the record, I’d have kept you.) But even the edited menu is like that choice between a sheep’s foot and a kangaroo’s doo-dah. (Seriously, who books a honeymoon in the Australian Outback?)
I tried Googling Bible verses, philosophers, the words ‘any such thing as unexplained death’. Even worse, I put it to E as he was getting up. ‘Bollocks,’ he said, doing that thing where he reaches up to touch the ceiling. ‘Don’t listen to her. It’s just shit, that’s what it is.’ He offered to work from home.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get some sleep.’

I got you hooked now, didn’t I?! No worries, order your eBook (out now!) or pre-order your paperback (out next week!) directly from Orenda Books here. Your June will never have been more jubilant!