A local author has just released the sequel to her much loved first book. Catherine Butler published the Japson Club in 2017, which follows a timid young woman named Anna as she gets caught in scandal and an underworld of crime at an exclusive equestrian club in England. The sequel, called The Wolff Legacy, picks up three weeks after the end of The Japson Club as Anna grapples with the trauma of what happened to her in the first book. When her job in construction gives her the opportunity to work in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, she hopes it will be her opportunity to heal. However, a character from her past keeps popping up and threatening to pull her back into the chaos. Readers are also introduced to journalist, Maria, who is given the task of interviewing an old lady on her deathbed with a dark past and a strange connection to Anna and her story.
Catherine says the process of writing The Wolff Legacy was different than The Japson Club, in that it was more thoughtful and calculated. “The initial mindset was almost like an engineer came along and put the structure in, and then the artist came along and put the feeling and the emotion into the story,” she says. She attributes this to the lessons she learned while writing her first book, but also to the fact that she was in a completely different mindset this time around. “When I wrote The Japson Club, I was a new mother and living in the kind of weird surreal existence that you live as the mother of a young child, where time has a different feeling. This time, I was a professional, working a day job on a very structured kind of time-table.”
The inspiration to make Guernsey the backdrop for The Wolff Legacy came from several trips to the island with her father. Catherine has only been to the island twice, but her father was a frequent visitor to Guernsey, and served as an important source of information about the island as she was writing the book. She also enjoyed reaching out to business owners and residents of the island to make sure she was setting the scene as realistically as possible. “That was a nice experience. I was reaching out to people and people were reaching back and interested in the book.”
Anna’s job in construction mirrors Catherine’s own career, and she was able to use her experience to really highlight what it is like for a woman to work in a male dominated field. “Her life as a project manager in construction, and some of the frustrations she has in the corporate world, are things that I have experienced. So, it’s quite nice to be able to tell that story through her.”
The Wolff Legacy is darker in nature than The Japson Club, but Catherine hopes that her readers will still enjoy the novel and be able to connect to the characters. “I really love it when people identify with the characters, and it makes them think about their own motivations. By getting people to start thinking about their feelings, you can help them develop a little bit.”
The Wolff Legacy is now available online through Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and most other online book retailers. You can also request of copy directly from Catherine, by contacting her on Facebook under CJ Butler, or visiting her website www.cjbutler.net.
