In Casting Off we met Emma Bamford. Stressed out and fed up with London life, working 80-hour weeks and with no hint of a love life, Emma suddenly decided to quit her job, pack up her life and go and live with a man she's never met, and his cat, on a yacht in Borneo. In Casting Off we followed Emma on her amazing adventures as she sailed the globe in search of something more. We laughed, we cried and we 'aaahhhh'ed. Untie the Lines picks up where Casting Off left off. There's love in the air in the form of Guy, the handsome sailor Emma met in Casting Off . Will they sail off happily into the sunset together? And there's an abundance of sailing adventure to be had in the USA and Caribbean too. But there are also difficult times, as we follow Emma's journey through more heartache and anguish, as she is forced to return to London, to her old, crippling life. Things spiral out of control until one day Emma, exhausted and suffering from anxiety attacks, just can't take a step further along the same path any more and she is forced to seek help and admit that it's time to change things once and for all. Untie the Lines is another thrilling, funny and absorbing installment of Emma's life. It's also deeply moving and will ring true with anyone affected by the stresses and fast pace of modern life and the battle between head and heart.
Author
Emma Bamford is an East Midlands-based author and journalist who has worked at The Independent and Daily Express and most recently as News Editor of the i newspaper. She had a fairly normal life to begin with, growing up with her younger brother and sister under the watchful eyes of her parents in Lincoln and Nottingham. After studying English Literature at Southampton University and Newspaper Journalism at UCLan, she started work as a cub reporter for the Bicester Review and then the Derby Evening Telegraph, cutting her journalistic teeth interviewing organisers of local fetes and grilling parish council members. Fleet Street beckoned and highlights of her career as a reporter and news editor include asking F1 driver Jenson Button what his favourite toasted sandwich filling was, quizzing the incumbent Home Secretary on his preferred kind of cheese (spot a pattern?) and peeing in Bruce Forsyth’s downstairs loo. There was some serious and hard-hitting journalism in there for a fair few years, too. Then, in her early 30s and bored with this ‘fairly normal life’ she’d created for herself, Emma took a career break and, despite protestations from friends and family, answered an advert on the internet for ‘crew wanted’ and flew to Borneo to live on a boat with a man she had never met and his cat. She found herself hunting for elephants in the jungle, visiting deserted islands and running from pirates. Finally she ended up among billionaires, working as a stewardess on a superyacht in Italy. Her adventures form the basis of her first book, Casting Off, which is being published by Bloomsbury on July 3. Emma now works part-time as a freelance to give herself space to write and make the jump from memoir to novels. Her ambition is to make book writing her full-time career. Tropical settings feature high in her inspiration and as her books’ settings, although she lives about as far away from the sea as it is possible, in landlocked rural Derbyshire. And, while she may make self-deprecating jokes constantly, she really is serious about figuring out what is important in life and finding the freedom to be who you want to be.
