Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Neighbors
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1971
WEBSITE: http://hannahmarymckinnon.com/
CITY: Oakville
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
British/Swiss/Canadian.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1971, in Manchester, England; married; husband’s name Robert; children: three sons.
EDUCATION:Studied in Geneva, Switzerland, B.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Purchasing manager for motor company; CEO of an IT recruitment business; novelist.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Hannah Mary McKinnon writes romance stories. She was born in 1971 in Manchester, England, but moved a year later to Switzerland. After a long career in business working as a purchasing manager, and then as the CEO of an IT recruitment business, she decided to return to her first love, writing. She moved to Ontario, Canada in 2010 with her husband.
Time After Time
In 2016, McKinnon wrote Time After Time, a romantic comedy fantasy about love, loss, and second chances that evokes Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors. Corporate lawyer Hayley Cooper is in the middle of a tough marriage to Rick. She commiserates with her girlfriend Ellen over drinks and plays the “what if” game, wondering what might have been. She goes to sleep but surprisingly wakes up the next morning in bed with her first love, Chris. Over the next few days, each of her former boyfriends reappears and she lives an alternate life learning how things would have been different with each. Is the grass always greener?
Writing on the Quick Brown Fox blog, Brian Henry observed that whether likeable or not, the characters are all believable, and commented: “McKinnon has created alternative realities for Hayley that are true to life, whether those lives are funny, disappointing or upsetting.”
The Neighbors
McKinnon followed up with The Neighbors in 2018. In Bromley, England, Abby and Nate are getting a new neighbor, Liam. Turns out that twenty years ago, Abby and Liam were a young couple in love. After a night of drinking, Abby caused a car accident that killed her brother. In grief and guilt, Abby decided never to see Liam again, thinking that he would hate her as much as she hated herself. Now, she makes her unexpected new neighbor Liam agree not to tell Nate about their past, even though Nate was a bystander at the car accident who was able to rescue Abby from the burning car, but not her brother. Abby also wants to keep her daughter Sarah away from Liam’s son Zac.
The book was enjoyable but flawed, with a deus ex machina resolution, according to a writer in Publishers Weekly, who added: “This sophomore effort works better as an exploration of personal relationships than a thriller.” On the other hand, Booklist reviewer Stephanie Turza remarked: “An emotionally wrought and fast-paced domestic drama, The Neighbors will satisfy readers looking for something new.” Writing online at All about Romance, Shannon Dyer said: “There are so many ways I thought things might turn out, but Ms. McKinnon takes things in a totally unexpected direction, and I love the fact that she opted not to just play things safe.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Stephanie Turza, review of The Neighbors, p. 22.
Publishers Weekly, January 22, 2018, review of The Neighbors, p. 63.
ONLINE
All about Romance, https://allaboutromance.com/ (March 12, 2018), Shannon Dyer, review of The Neighbors.
Quick Brown Fox, http://quick-brown-fox-canada.blogspot.com/ (May 15, 2016), Brian Henry, review of Time After Time.
I was born in the UK, grew up in Switzerland and moved to Canada in 2010. After a long and successful career in recruitment, I quit the corporate world in favor of writing.
My first novel, Time After Time (a lighthearted rom-com) was published in June 2016. My second, the domestic suspense story The Neighbors, arrived March 2018. My third will follow in 2019.
I live in Oakville, Ontario, with my husband and three sons, and I'm delighted by my twenty second commute.
Find me on Facebook www.facebook.com/hannahmarymckinnon, Twitter @HannahMMcKinnon, and on Instagram @HannahMaryMcKinnon. For even more, visit my website www.hannahmarymckinnon.com.
I was born in 1971 in Manchester, UK to British & Swiss parents. A year later they moved my older sister and I to Switzerland. Rather unsurprisingly I love mountains, chocolate and cheese… or mountains of chocolate and cheese, and my sister, of course.
After finishing commercial studies in Geneva, I worked as a PA for DuPont. A year later I moved to Neuchâtel and became the Purchasing Manager for an ultra-cool company that made motors for industrial and space applications. Finding myself lacking in theoretical knowledge, I returned to university, studying part-time for a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. And then a friend of a friend introduced me to another friend who’d started up an IT recruitment business. Over the next fifteen years I rose through the ranks to become CEO.
Things outside of work were hardly boring. A chance encounter back in the dark ages of the Internet in 1999 led me down the aisle with Rob, my Canadian rock, five months later. Actually it was exactly ten weeks after we met face-to-face at the Saint John airport in New Brunswick, Canada – and we’re still married. True story. Our first son was born in 2003, followed by identical twin boys just sixteen months later, so I’m heavily outnumbered. In 2010 we all moved to Oakville in Ontario, Canada.
Maybe it was the failed attempt at a start-up company, or the fact I suddenly found myself in my forties, but one morning I decided to follow my oldest passion, started writing, and never wanted to look back. I write fiction for adults and dabble a little in kid-lit. Sometimes I think I’ll never have enough time to get all of the ideas out of my head and on paper. I also have a soft spot for short stories and mud runs. I love mud runs… hey, wait… that’s another story I could write…!
The Neighbors
Publishers Weekly. 265.4 (Jan. 22, 2018): p63+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Neighbors
Hannah Mary McKinnon. Mira, $15.99 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-7783-1100-3
Nate Morris has no idea that Liam Jefferson, his new next-door neighbor in Bromley, England, shares an intimate history with his wife, Abby--and neither Abby nor Liam enlightens him in McKinnon's enjoyable if flawed second novel (after 2016's Time After Time). Twenty years earlier, Abby and Liam were in love and planned to move in together, but when a night of drinking resulted in an accident that injured Abby and killed her younger brother, she ended the relationship. Unexpectedly reunited in Bromley, the two confront their attraction to each other as Abby desperately tries to keep her teenage daughter, Sarah, away from Liam's alluring son, Zac. The possibility that Liam, not Nate, might be Sarah's father raises the stakes. Meanwhile, Liam's wife, Nancy, pursues her own agenda. Ultimately, though, the plot falters, and a deus ex machina resolution and late revelation about the long-ago accident feel contrived. This sophomore effort works better as an exploration of personal relationships than a thriller. Agents: Cassandra Rodgers and Sam Hiyate, Rights Factory (Canada). (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Neighbors." Publishers Weekly, 22 Jan. 2018, p. 63+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525839776/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6430f62b. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525839776
The Neighbors
Stephanie Turza
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Neighbors. By Hannah Mary McKinnon. Mar. 2018. 384p. MIRA, paper, $15.99 (97807783110031.
Nate couldn't ignore the U-Haul van that pulled up outside the house next door. He and his wife, Abby, and their daughter, Sarah, had been friendly with their previous neighbor, until the elderly woman succumbed to dementia and had to sell her house. Happy to be neighborly and more than a little curious about the new owners, Nate introduces himself, and Liam, Nancy, and their son, Zac, seem perfectly pleasant. Meanwhile, Abby can't believe that Liam is back in her life. They'd dated before she married Nate, right before a terrible accident changed the course of her life forever. Now that the memories she's been suppressing for so long are literally and figuratively too close for comfort, she has to figure out how to keep the biggest secret of her life. But Abby's not the only one with a secret, and she's not the only one struggling to hold on to a happy marriage. An emotionally wrought and fast-paced domestic drama, The Neighbors will satisfy readers looking for something new after Paula Hawkins' or Liane Moriarty's latest. McKinnon (Time after Time, 2016) weaves twists and turns throughout and keeps readers guessing until the final pages.--Stephanie Turza
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Turza, Stephanie. "The Neighbors." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250825/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5e60eb2f. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250825
Desert Isle Keeper
The Neighbors
Hannah Mary McKinnon
Buy This Book
I picked up Hannah Mary McKinnon’s The Neighbors without really knowing what to expect and I love it so much when a book takes me completely by surprise. The premise intrigued me, so I figured it would be a good way to pass a few hours, but, once I started reading, I realized the book was so much more than that. It’s a story of love, secrets, and betrayal, and I loved every minute I spent with it.
In 1992, Abby and her brother Tom go out for a night on the town in hopes that it’ll cheer Tom up a bit after having just been dumped by his girlfriend. Abby doesn’t plan on getting drunk, but one thing leads to another, and both she and Tom end up pretty intoxicated. Still, Abby figures she’ll be fine to drive home, so she gets behind the wheel, but her decision has terrible consequences. There’s an accident which kills Tom and leaves Abby with an enormous amount of guilt.
Abby has no clue how she’ll cope with what she’s done. Her mother refuses to forgive her for her part in Tom’s death – and because she doesn’t think she deserves forgiveness, Abby’s okay with that. In fact, she convinces herself that she should sacrifice her own happiness in a vain attempt to make amends for what happened to Tom. To this end, she breaks things off with Liam, who is the love of her life. At first, he resists her attempts to end their relationship, but Abby stands firm and he eventually gives up.
Fast forward twenty years: Abby is married to Nate, the man who rescued her from the car accident all those years ago. They have a teenaged daughter, and they’re quite happy. Nate is well aware of Abby’s emotional scars, and he’s devoted his life to helping her find some semblance of peace, and, for the most part, he’s succeeded. Abby still thinks about that night, but the guilt and grief that once crippled her have eased over time, and she’s pretty functional these days.
Then, Liam and his family move in next door, and suddenly, long-buried emotions are forced to the forefront. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, Abby and Liam agree to keep their previous relationship a secret from their respective spouses. Their interactions are super awkward because of this, but Nate and Nancy, Liam’s wife, don’t seem to think anything is amiss. They just sort of keep mingling, and everyone pretends all is well, even though it obviously is not.
As time passes, the two families begin spending quite a bit of time together, and things get incredibly messy. Abby and Liam eventually rekindle their relationship, while Nancy and Nate form a friendship with some dangerous overtones. The lives these four have so carefully constructed slowly begin to crumble, and they all seem powerless to stop it from happening.
The Neighbors is one of those books that’s impossible to put down. It’s obvious from pretty near the beginning that things won’t turn out well for these characters, but I kept hoping for some kind of miracle. All of them have gone through a ton of really hard stuff, and I just wanted things to be okay for them. They all felt so real, and I give the author a great deal of credit for crafting characters who felt like real people with real joys and struggles rather than two-dimensional beings.
But it’s not always easy to like them. They all keep secrets from one another, and, while Ms. McKinnon does a great job showing the reader why they act the way they do, I sometimes found it hard to sympathize with those actions. I struggled with Abby, in particular. It’s obvious she’s deeply wounded, but I really disliked the way she treated Nate. His love for her is so apparent, and I wanted her to see and appreciate all the good things she had in her life.
I was totally blown away by the ending to this story. I’m obviously not going to spoil it for you, but trust me when I say it’s beyond anything you can imagine. There are so many ways I thought things might turn out, but Ms. McKinnon takes things in a totally unexpected direction, and I love the fact that she opted not to just play things safe. The ending won’t appeal to all readers, but I personally can’t imagine a more fitting conclusion to this very complicated novel.
If you love books that explore the secrets married people keep from one another, I strongly urge you to give The Neighbors a try. It’s unlike anything I’ve read in quite a while, and I’m now on a hunt for more like it.
Book Details
Reviewer:
Shannon Dyer
Review Date:
March 12, 2018
Publication Date:
03/2018
Grade:
A
Sensuality
Warm
Book Type:
Women's Fiction
#BookReview: The Neighbors by Hannah Mary McKinnon @HannahMMcKinnon #TheNeighbors
Posted on 16/03/2018 by Hayley at RatherTooFondofBooks
About the Book
Abby looks forward to meeting the family who just moved in next door—until she realizes they’re the one couple who could expose her deepest secrets.
After a night of fun back in 1992, Abby is responsible for a car crash that kills her beloved brother. It’s a mistake she can never forgive, so she pushes away Liam, the man she loves most, knowing that he would eventually hate her for what she’s done, the same way she hates herself.
Twenty years later, Abby’s husband, Nate, is also living with a deep sense of guilt. He was the driver who first came upon the scene of Abby’s accident, the man who pulled her to safety before the car erupted in flames—the man who could not save her brother in time. It’s this guilt, this regret, that binds them together. They understand each other. Or so Nate believes.
In a strange twist of fate, Liam moves into the neighborhood with his own family, releasing a flood of memories that Abby has been trying to keep buried all these years. Abby and Liam, in a complicit agreement, pretend never to have met, yet cannot resist the pull of the past—nor the repercussions of the terrible secrets they’ve both been carrying…
My Thoughts
The Neighbors is a novel about how the past and your secrets always catch up with you. A couple, Liam and Nancy, with a teenage son move in next to Nate and Abby and it turns out that there is a link between Abby and Liam with unresolved issues from the past. I love books that look at relationships and secrets and this book was so readable, I didn’t want to put it down from the moment I first started reading it. Some of the things in Abby’s past are clear from the start but there are other things bubbling around that I simply had to keep reading in order to find out what else there was to know. It becomes clear that other people in Abby’s life have their own secrets and it seems that at some point all will converge.
This is one of those books where I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the main character Abby because of what happened when she was younger, even when I couldn’t condone some of her actions later in the novel. It felt like the accident when she was younger had completely undone her, it had made her into a different person and someone she couldn’t even recognise anymore. It felt like even in the present day that she’d never fully come to terms with what happened, or really figured out who she was without her brother. There were elements of this that I could empathise with – I think losing someone close who is pretty much the same age as you when you’re young does change you, it certainly did me when my best friend died when we were 20. I always felt like I lost a part of me when she died and I’ve never been able to put myself back together how I was before and I could see that it was the same for Abby.
The novel has multiple narrators and goes back and forth in time so the picture of each character is gradually built up. I felt quite unsure as to how I felt about the other characters – they all seemed to have their flaws and I kept going from liking them to disliking them and back again but I enjoyed being kept on my toes. Everyone in this novel did feel like a real person though; the flaws and the secrets and the way they all behaved felt very believable and while I didn’t always like how they acted, it did feel so human and real.
I very much enjoyed how this novel also explores guilt, and the way different people deal with the bad things they believe they’ve done. There is a definite sliding scale of how each of us feel guilt and it was interesting how this book looks at Abby and how she has such terrible guilt for her brother that is all-consuming but it doesn’t stop her consciously making decisions later on that have the potential to really hurt people emotionally. There is also the unspoken agreement that comes to pass between Abby and Liam not to let on to their respective spouses that they already know each other when they are seemingly introduced for the first time. I was interested to see how that played out in the subsequent chapters to see how each of them felt about the lie by omission.
There was a sense running through this book of fate and destiny – that there are people we’re destined to meet, and a course that we may well be on regardless of what we do to change things. Abby could have behaved differently than she did in the present day but it felt like she still had one foot firmly in the past and fate was pushing her towards the way her life might have been if the accident hadn’t happened. I always find the idea of fate fascinating, I’m never sure whether I believe in it or not but sometimes life takes you on a path with a series of events that makes you wonder occasionally.
There are elements of this book that I saw coming and others that caught me completely off-guard, which was great. I like a book that makes me start to feel comfortable and then pulls the rug out from under me and The Neighbors definitely did that.
The Neighbors is a domestic suspense novel that is very gripping, full of tension and a whole rollercoaster of emotions; I definitely recommend it!
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
The Neighbors is out now!
About the Author
I was born in 1971 in Manchester, UK to British & Swiss parents. A year later they moved my older sister and I to Switzerland. Rather unsurprisingly I love mountains, chocolate and cheese… or mountains of chocolate and cheese, and my sister, of course.
After finishing commercial studies in Geneva, I worked as a PA for DuPont. A year later I moved to Neuchâtel and became the Purchasing Manager for an ultra-cool company that made motors for industrial and space applications. Finding myself lacking in theoretical knowledge, I returned to university, studying part-time for a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. And then a friend of a friend introduced me to another friend who’d started up an IT recruitment business. Over the next fifteen years I rose through the ranks to become CEO.
Things outside of work were hardly boring. A chance encounter back in the dark ages of the Internet in 1999 led me down the aisle with Rob, my Canadian rock, five months later. Actually it was exactly ten weeks after we met face-to-face at the Saint John airport in New Brunswick, Canada – and we’re still married. True story. Our first son was born in 2003, followed by identical twin boys just sixteen months later, so I’m heavily outnumbered. In 2010 we all moved to Oakville in Ontario, Canada.
Maybe it was the failed attempt at a start-up company, or the fact I suddenly found myself in my forties, but one morning I decided to follow my oldest passion, started writing, and never wanted to look back. I write fiction for adults and dabble a little in kid-lit. Sometimes I think I’ll never have enough time to get all of the ideas out of my head and on paper. I also have a soft spot for short stories and mud runs. I love mud runs… hey, wait… that’s another story I could write…!
(Author Bio and Photo taken from: HannahMaryMcKinnon.com)
Rating: 5 / 5. HarperCollins ebook, release date June 2, pre-order now for just $2 from Amazon.ca here. More from Joanne Baird here. This review is re-posted from GoodReads.
Posted by Brian Henry at 10:38 AM
I love books and films that look at what might have happened if people had made different choices. Films like Sliding Doors and of course, It's A Wonderful Life. Books like Laura Barnett's The Versions of Us and Carmel Harrington's Every Time a Bell Rings. And Hannah McKinnon has written a book which is right up there as one of my favourites.
Hayley is a high flying lawyer working in mergers and acquisitions. She's always loved her job and been very good at it but recently pressure at work has taken over. She's spending more and more time at work, seeing less and less of husband Rick and children Millie and Danny and more time snapping and arguing with them.
After an argument she storms off to best friend Ellen's and over a bottle of wine they do the “what if” chat about Hayley's previous boyfriends. When she wakes the next morning she is horrified to find herself in bed with Chris, her first serious boyfriend. Has she had so much to drink that she has cheated on her husband and can't remember?
Poor Hayley soon comes to realise that she seems to be married to Chris and it most definitely hasn't worked out well. "Am I getting what I asked for? A glimpse into how my life could have been?" Hayley wonders. And when she wakens up over the next few days, she finds she is in a relationship with each of the men she has had serious relationships with. "He said it's Saturday. Dear god, it's like Groundhog Day meets Sliding Doors!"
What’s great fun about this book was that although Hayley can clearly remember all about her real life with Rick and her children, nobody else can in these alternate lives. All the people she loved and cared about are living the alternate lives, too, leading sometimes to really funny situations and sometimes to really heartbreaking ones.
Hayley realising that she’s the leader of a kickboxing class is just hilarious. Finding out what happened to Hayley's friends and family in some of the alternate versions gave me a lump in the throat. Hannah McKinnon is just terrific at making me feel all the emotions along with Hayley.
Time After Time is a book I raced through. Although it moves back and forward in time and different realities, I was never confused as to what part of Hayley's life I was reading about, and whether likeable or not, the characters are all so believable. Hannah McKinnon has created alternative realities for Hayley that are true to life, whether those lives are funny, disappointing or upsetting – "Life was messy, it got complicated. What mattered, Hayley realised, was how you dealt with it."
Hugely enjoyable, a must read for anyone who loves a great romantic comedy story and believes in true love. And a lesson that, as always, you must be careful what you wish for!
Note: Hannah is often a guest speaker at my workshops. See the most recent workshop(s) that she'll be speaking at here (and scroll down) ~Brian
In the meanwhile, you can pre-order a Kindle copy of Time After Time for just $2 on pretty much all the Amazon sites. Check it out on Amazon.ca here. I’ve already ordered mine ~Brian