How we are shaped by our ancestors’ actions - Selsey author

It has been published by Austin Macauley, £8.99, kindle £3.50, available from www.austinmaculey.com and Amazon.

Lara said: “I was sitting on a plane flying off to Greece on a week’s holiday and I found myself reading an article in the paper about a notorious Nazi war criminal who had not only evaded capture but who had blatantly returned back to Europe on several occasions after initially escaping to South America. This got me thinking about the actions of our ancestors and their future consequences on members of their families. I once met a very charming and funny guy, who told me that his great grandfather had been the captain of The Titanic. After the predictable slightly dark jokes about obstacles up ahead, he made reference to the souls of the departed and their families who had to somehow battle on without their loved ones.

“Clearly it was a matter that weighed on his mind and while there was nothing that he could do to change the past, part of him was forever caught up in the events of that fateful night. For some people the actions of their forefathers will be a matter of pride and benefit, but for others, the actions of family members who they probably never met will forever define how they deal with the future and their own role in it.

“This was the starting point for my story. As I started to explore this idea, I made an effort to start looking into the escape of the Nazis after the war. This was a real shift in mindset for me as for years I had deliberately blocked any real consideration or reading about World War Two. The horrors of war were not something that I wanted to know about as I knew it would upset my comfortable little world. At the time of research and writing, I never believed for a second that any of us would ever see the horrors of such brutal conflict as part of day-to-day broadcasting. How tragically misguided I was.

“I have many Latin American friends from years of working in ski resorts and from spending quite a bit of time in Latin American countries, travelling, hiking and many years ago working in a school in Santiago in Chile. I really wanted to capture the imagination of others and spark interest in Latin America with this story. I have used my own personal experience of a loved one with dementia as the backdrop to the story. Sadly, my poor mum passed away some years ago having had a very determined battle with vascular dementia. It was in the ensuing few months that I started to write this story and it was a channel for my grief. All of the main characters in my story are fictional, but I have borrowed personality traits, relationships, words spoken and some minor events from my own family in an effort to offer an element of relatability to the reader.”