No Number Nine by FJ Campbell Guest Post and Giveaway

No Number Nine is the perfect read to get you in the mood for the Olympics.  What do you do when your amazing, beloved sister dies? Hide in your room for two years. Sleep with a very, very wrong man. Leave home and start a new life, lying to everyone you meet including your kind employer, your curious friends and the man you love? 

Pip Mitchell’s an expert at making seriously bad decisions. But when her past, present and future collide at the Sydney Olympic Games, she’s going to have to decide whose side she’s on – or she’ll lose everyone she loves

No Number Nine is currently being run as a book tour at the following blogs, please do check out the reviews on this fantastic read.

Below is a guest post from author FJ Campbell for those who want to know more from the author.

Why I had to include the Olympics as a major theme in my novel No Number Nine!

I first visited the Olympics the year after I left school in 1992, travelling to Barcelona with friends and watching hockey (of course), athletics, rowing and whatever other tickets we could get our hands on. There was top-notch sport to watch in the sunshine, with a beer in my hand and a massive grin on my face, as you can imagine. I was 18 years old and freedom beckoned, my life as an adult was beginning, I had money I'd earned from working all summer in WHSmiths, and now I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The Olympics and Paralympics are a joy, pure and simple. Nevermind the politics, nevermind the money and the sponsors and all the rest of it - when you're a fan and you're clutching your tickets in your sweaty, excited little hand, and you know you're going to see a whole afternoon or evening of sport, you can't beat that feeling. There's so much drama to be had in the athlete who beats her rival by a millisecond, or pulls up in agony with a muscle strain, or falls, or flies through the air, or scores that magic goal, or breaks a world record.

Four years later, I was in Atlanta for the full two weeks, plus another two weeks volunteering at the Paralympics. I was with roughly the same group of friends and was 22, just finished uni, completely broke, a job as an accountant waiting for me in London at the end of the summer. Again, I couldn't get enough of the sport, the athletes, the perfect spectacle of it all, as well as the sunshine, the kipping on sofas and spare rooms, the jammy luck of scoring passes to the AT&T tent where the athletes and their coaches hung out when they weren't competing.

Sydney 2000 was my absolute favourite Olympics, and when I wrote No Number Nine, that was the obvious choice of setting. It was the first time I'd been to Australia, and I spent a month there in all, travelling after the Olympics. Sydney was like a beautiful dream - the city is iconic, laid back, cool, buzzing with energy. 16 years later, it was all so fresh in my mind - the Olympic stadium where Cathy Freeman made history; the lakes at Penrith where Steve Redgrave broke records; Bondai Beach, pubs like the Slip Inn, Harry's Cafe de Wheels, the hotels built for the Games, the sunshine, the smiles, the sport. It didn't take a lot to fire up my imagination that all the things that happened to Pip in no Number Nine could've happened there.

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