Entwined With You

Entwined with You

Entwined with You is the hotly anticipated third novel in the Crossfire series. The worldwide phenomenon continues as Eva and Gideon face the demons of their pasts and accept the consequences of their obsessive desires.

The Crossfire series features Sylvia Day's Bared to You and Reflected in You which were both number one bestsellers internationally. Sylvia Day was Penguin's biggest author of 2012 and Reflected in You was Penguin's biggest ever eBook. To the delight of fans around the globe Sylvia Day recently announced that Eva and Gideon's passionate saga will continue beyond book three.

From the moment I first met Gideon Cross, I recognised something in him that I needed. Something I couldn't resist. I also saw the dangerous and damaged soul inside - so much like my own. I was drawn to it. I needed him as surely as I needed my heart to beat.

No one knows how much he risked for me. How much I'd been threatened, or just how dark and desperate the shadow of our pasts would become.

Entwined by our secrets, we tried to defy the odds. We made our own rules and surrendered completely to the exquisite power of possession….

Sylvia Day is the #1 New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of more than a dozen award-winning novels sold in 39 countries. She is a #1 bestselling author in 11 countries, and a reader favourite across several genres, with millions of copies of her books in print. She has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Author and her work has been honoured as Amazon's Best of the Year in Romance. She has won the RT Book Reviews Reviewers' Choice Award and been nominated for Romance Writers of America's prestigious RITA award twice. She is currently president of the Romance Writers of America, an association of over 10,000 writers.

Entwined with You
Penguin Australia
Author: Sylvia Day
RRP: $19.99

Interview with Sylvia Day

Question: Can you tell us about Entwined with You?

Sylvia Day: Entwined with You is the middle book in a quintet of books, number three. In the first two books readers were introduced to Eva Trammel and Gideon Cross who are two very young and damaged lovers who managed to find each other in the bustling city of New York; they fall madly in love. We follow the couple over the course of the series as they try to work through their copious amounts of baggage to reach their happily ever after.

In the first book Eva Trammel and Gideon Cross meet each other and first realise they've found the person that they want to explore a relationship with; the second book in the series is really dark and angsty because there are a lot of difficulties and many dark surprises. As we move into Entwined with You the couple have weathered the storm and Entwined with You is really about two people who are:
one) trying to heal after a really dramatic break-up with each other and; two) finding the strength to move forward as a couple, when they're fighting against the world instead of against, each other.

Question: What inspired you to write the Crossfire series?

Sylvia Day: A historical novel of mine called, Seven Years to Sin. I was working on Seven Years to Sin back in 2010, it was published in 2011 and in that story we are following a couple who have also had traumatic childhoods; the heroine was a victim of child abuse and the hero had a very emotional and mentally abusive homelife. These two people meet each other and in the course of Seven Years to Sin they feel as if they've found their soulmate because they have somebody who knows what they've been through and that's their point of connection and reference – it's what makes them sure that they found the one.

As I was researching for Seven Years to Sin I found that in reality it was different, that while survivors of childhood trauma have the tendency to be drawn to each other without knowing that about each other, because it's not something you introduce yourself with, there is a quite a high incidents of survivors realising that the person that they've fallen in love with is also a survivor. There is an acidity and understanding; both have learnt different ways of coping using different coping mechanisms to survive and unfortunately a lot of the time those two things really conflict and instead of bringing them closer together, it brings them further apart.

I found doing the research was very fascinating and I was fascinated by the relationship dynamic. I wanted to write a story about two emotionally damaged people and answer the question -Can two emotionally damaged people find a healthy, happy and romantic relationship with each other?' I knew I could do it in a book, it was typical of a romance book (I have been writing romance for ten years) but the typically formula for a romance novel is one book, the couple meets and at the end it's -happily ever after' but I knew I couldn't do that with a story like what I wanted to write. I knew it had to be multiple books and that started Crossfire.


Question: Are any of the characters inspired by people in your real life?

Sylvia Day: To a certain extent, authors use personal experience to add realism to their stories and there is always a level of that. For the most part characters are composites of things; there is never one person upon which a character is based on. As far as research wise, Gideon has an atypical sexual parasomnia and that is a case study and he mentions it to Eva that Dr. Peterson told him about this couple and the stories he tells in that first book is an actual real-life case study of a couple who were suffering with atypical sexual parasomnia; it was directly tied to some of the research that I did. Other parts are composites of things.


Question: What's next for the Crossfire series and the next book?

Sylvia Day: Crossfire is a quintet, five books and the first two and a half books really were Eva's story but by the time you get to the middle point of Entwined with You, Eva has really concurred her demons, her skeletons are out of the closet and everything is out in the open whilst she has put her foot down about things that she really needed to and she is stronger and in a more stable place by the middle point of Entwined with You. The last two and a half books are Gideon's story and it had to be that way because Eva is the anchor for the entire relationship, she has to be in a good place before Gideon could trust that he could lean on her and rely on her to get him through his issues. In the first book Eva was a runner and was constantly running from everything and to get her from there to where she is in Entwined with You is a strong base for Gideon. Moving forward we have Gideon's story for the rest of the series; the next book will be heavily focused on getting Gideon to where he needs to be to live happily ever after.


Interview by Brooke Hunter