The Keeper of Stories

Author/Guide: Sally Page

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: A woman keeps stories and then begins to tell her own….

ISBN: B08NCBM2ZF
Genre: Fiction, Inspired by true events

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What you need to know before your trail

She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they always had done, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her…

When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B – a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties – she meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the keeper of stories, she doesn’t have a story to tell. At least, not one she can share.

Mrs B is no fool and knows there is more to Janice than meets the eye. What is she hiding? After all, doesn’t everyone have a story to tell?

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Travel Guide

Keeper of Stories set in Cambridge/London – and the Cleveland Street scandal

Locations are not key to this novel but the story behind it is particulaly Cleveland Street.

The so-called Cleveland Street scandal which happened in 1889. The man in charge of the Jack the Ripper case, Inspector Abberline was put on the case.

Cleveland street was the street where police found a homosexual male brothel. Sexual acts between men were illegal at the time so this was a huge find. More importantly, the government was accused of covering up the scandal as many of its clients were found to be a mix of the upper classes. There were government ministers, aristocratic and other patrons of wealth.

The Scandal reached the royal palace when Prince Albert Victor was suspected of having visited the brothel. He had also been suspected in the Jack the Ripper enquiry only a year earuer.