Monday, 14 October 2019

Friday Fiction Feature: Rise of the Petrol Queen

I am delighted to have Jon Hartless on here to talk about his outstanding and original book, Rise of the Petrol Queen.

Rise of the Petrol Queen follows on directly from Full Throttle in which our heroine, Poppy Orpington, astounded the racing community by taking them on and beating them in her petrol-fuelled car. Rise of the Petrol Queen sees Poppy now embarking on her first full season as a driver while also setting up her own car-making business in the hope of making a car available for the workers rather than just the obscenely wealthy.

What follows is her battle on the track and in the boardroom – and matters aren’t helped by the frequent and unfair personal attacks on her from the bigoted British Press who hate Poppy for her unconventional life...


Rise of the Petrol Queen is Steampunk, (an alternative-history adventure in which steam was the main source of power rather than petrol, electric, nuclear etc) but beware; this is a world very close to our own, in which the more fantastical elements of traditional Steampunk – the clockwork automatons, the airships, the sanitised Victorian era – are absent. Instead, Poppy lives in a very real, grimy world where she is unable to get ahead or to prove her worth simply because she is born female, working-class and disabled.


Bio: Jon Hartless was born in the 1970s and has spent much of his life in the Midlands and Worcestershire. His latest novels, a steampunk motor racing adventure examining the gulf between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed, started with Full Throttle in August 2017 and continued with Rise of the Petrol Queen in 2019, both published by Accent Press.


Twitter: @JHartlessauthor


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