Books by Christina Godley

The author's love of Hampton Court Palace inspired the creation of "Lion at the Gateway." She tells the story of Maximus, a noble and weary old circus lion,who escapes from his cage.His break for freedom allows him to run in the grounds of the palace and feel like a cub again.Maximus undertakes a quest to find and fight "the horned white Zebra without any stripes,"(the Unicorn on the gate). The Sanders family help the old lion to find the truth along the way and point him in the right direction for his return back home to Africa.The author hopes children of all ages enjoy the story and have fun looking for the Lion and the Unicorn on the gates of the palace, just as old Maximus did.

My Wicked Aunt Leonora is the author's third novel. She hopes that honesty and humour will appeal to the reader rather than sentiment and nostalgia. The main character, Kathryn Shaw, has had an unusual and eventful twenty five years of life. She is feisty, wired and generous to a fault. After spending most of childhood in a Care Home, she convinces herself that romance is out of the question and steels herself against disappointment. Unable to sleep from a reoccurring nightmare of drowning, she takes on night time work in a bistro just off the King's Road in London, enabling her to paint seascapes during the day. Sharing a house with three other weird tenants reinforces her suspicions that they also prefer nocturnal activities. At the age of fifteen, after breaking into the Supervisor's office files at the Care Home, she discovers evidence of relatives in the form of hippie Godparents living in Newquay. They subsequently take her away to a better life where she finds fresh air and freedom to surf with Aussie Luke the Lifeguard.Kathryn's struggle to find out her true identity is further complicated on her twenty fifth birthday by the appearance of a weird and beautiful, previously unknown aunt, who believes herself to be a "wampire" from Transylvania. Her aunt is driven by the desire to kill Kathryn to make her immortal and attempts and fails to bite, poison, or run over, her niece in night time car chases around Fulham, Battersea Park and The World's End in Chelsea. Kathryn is aided by a lovable, Shakespeare-misquoting tramp who she secretly feeds from the bistro. The tramp has a posse of "Necromantic Numbskulls" to help him deal with wicked Aunt Leonora. Chaos ensues throughout London and then Newquay during the Christmas holiday season.