1) In 1988 Sara was the UKKW British Karate Kata
Champion and was the the Wado Rye British Fighting Champion.
2) Late in her teens she spent a summer in Ireland on the
Cliffs of Mohair pretending to be half Irish in order to sell her drawings of
her Celtic designs to tourists.
3) Sara played the violin form age four. At eighteen she
took and excelled at ABRSM Grade Eight but turned down the opportunity to go to
music collage.
4) She is Dyslexic.
5) She has never learnt to cook and was sixteen before she
even knew how to boil and egg.
6) She has been homeless in Greece on a few occasions but
only for a matter of days, but she has never been homeless in the UK - yet….
7) She had a car crash and broke her neck at the age of 24
and had a near death experience and went to ‘the light’.
8) Her love of the countryside has taken her on some long
walks, the longest being The West Moorland Way which is 100 miles long. Rather
than returning to ‘civilization' she slept in her tents in fields and mountains
on the way.
9) Sara has been a keen climber, climbing all over the UK
and preferring to climb unaided. She has even done some potholing.
10) She once found a tiny newly born kitten on the street,
it was only hours old. Not being able to leave it to die she took it home to
take care of it until it was of an age when she could give it away. It
had tufty hair on its head and so she named it Gorilla Head, mostly so she
would not get sentimental over it, or become attached. She was doing a job and
nothing more, the last thing she needed in her life was a kitten. Gorilla Head
is now fourteen years old and fights with her for space on her pillow every
night. She has been re-named Teddy.
The Other Daughter by
Sara Alexi is a compelling and gritty tale, set amongst the wild moors and
crooked streets of a Yorkshire Village, following one woman who finally
untangles herself from the clutches of a painful past and a self-centred
mother.
More than a decade after leaving home Dawn finds herself
stuck in a dead-end job, in a rundown flat, while her sister has it all - the
husband, children and prestigious job in sunny Australia. Their mum’s
favouritism is palpable, and even as she has a terrible fall leaving Dawn to
pick up the pieces, nothing Dawn does can live up to her perfect, absent
sister.
But still Dawn persists with taking care of her aging and
fragile mum, until one day it begins to feel like the only thing standing
between Dawn and her happiness is her mother's continued, pitiful existence...
Purchase The Other Daughter
About Sara Alexi
Sara Alexi is one of the top 150 most
successful, self-published authors of all time; a prolific writer, she has
written 15 books (and counting) in just four years, with book sales reaching
well over half a million copies.
Remarkably, Sara is dyslexic. At school
English lessons were a time of confusion, she found that books were
indecipherable hieroglyphics and she was unable to enjoy reading and writing;
growing up in a time when at a time when dyslexia was not well understood and
little or no support was available. And so her artistic nature was confined to
painting, an art form that she loved and would take her travelling around the
world.
Despite her dyslexia Sara qualified as a
psychotherapist and ran her own practice in Yorkshire for many years. In a
casual conversation with a client, she discovered that Agatha Christie, Jules
Verne and Hans Christian Andersen were all dyslexic, and Sara’s perspective
changed. The world of fiction opened to her with this shift in perception.
Sara now spends much of her time in a tiny rural village in the
Peloponnese, in Greece, where she is (very slowly) renovating a ruined stone
farmhouse, whilst observing the Greek way of life and absorbing the culture,
enriching her vision for both writing and painting.
Sara’s ‘Greek Village Series’ is inspired
by the people she has met travelling, her time spent in Greece alongside her
career as a psychotherapist; her writing provides a keenly observed, compassionate
insight into people, culture, and the human condition, and is set around a
charming rural Greek village
Predating the current refugee crisis in
Greece by some three years, Sara’s debut novel, The Illegal Gardener, focuses
on the immigration problems in Greece, and the clash of cultures that
accompanies those seeking a better life in the West.
Twitter - @SaraAlexi
Instagram - @sara.alexi
This is such an interesting insight into Sara's pre Greek Village life. She is amazing, such tenacity and versatility. Aha, is that where the name of one of 'Cyril's' dogs comes from?? Thank you for hours of enjoyment and creating our Greek Village readers family.
ReplyDelete