Dust and Rain: Chipo and Chibwe save the Green Valley

Ruth HartleyBooks by Ruth Hartley, Children's Stories, Dust and Rain, Southern Africa, ZambiaLeave a Comment

What happened next in the making of this story There is the ‘day job’ and there is the troubling and tragic war in Ukraine. It’s necessary to have something ordinary to occupy your mind. I must carry on with my stories and writing and I believe my little children’s book does matter, even in a small way. It certainly did […]

The story of two children who try to stop the drought destroying their farm

Ruth HartleyBook Launch, Books by Ruth Hartley, Children's Stories, Dust and Rain, Southern Africa, Zambia4 Comments

The long and surprising journey made by the story of the Chipo and Chibwe and the drought Readers and friends, I have wonderful and exciting news to share with all of you. For the first time in my long writing career, one of my books is being commercially published, not self-published. The Drought, my middle-grade children’s story, will be published […]

More or less around the world in eighty days

Ruth HartleyDisplacementLeave a Comment

The New Version The new version of Eighty Days with David Tennant is such fun that I’m blogging about it this week! The main scriptwriter, Ashley Pharoah, played with some of the realities of that era rather than continuing with Jules Verne’s romanticised view. I saw the original 1956 film as a teenager and loved it. Shocked to learn that […]

That was the way it was

Ruth HartleyConflict, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe1 Comment

My last blog post was about children of violence. Today I write about how I am also a child of violence and its impact on my family and children.   War was always around me but as a child, I didn’t know that. My parents were scarred by it – a normal human reaction after all. As a schoolgirl, I […]

The Children of Violence

Ruth HartleySouthern AfricaLeave a Comment

Martha Quest The sky is clean, the moon twisted and the temperature zero. Outdoors I would freeze and die. Here in my study, I think of Doris Lessing and the five novels that make up Children of Violence. When I read the first book, Martha Quest, I had the frightening sense that Lessing was writing me into existence and I […]