The Amber Heart: The Long, Long Story of a Story

I've blogged about my Polish novel The Amber Heart on and off over the years, but I don't think I've ever told the full unredacted story  - and now seems like as good a time as any, with a brand new, edited version out on Kindle, and a paperback and other eBook versions planned for early in 2021.

Lucky me.

Once upon a time, when I was young and optimistic, my first full length adult novel, titled The Golden Apple, was accepted for publication by The Bodley Head, an old and distinguished publisher. To be clear, this wasn't my very first novel. There were others, tucked away in folders, never to see the light of day. Practice novels. And there was a young adult novel, published in Scotland, before young adult was even a thing. But this was my first grown up novel that was fit to be seen. 

I considered myself very lucky. My agent for fiction at the time was Pat Kavanagh, and she was a fine agent with a wonderful reputation. Among other things, and unlike almost all agents now, who will tell you that publishers are looking for an 'oven ready book' (and that's a direct quote from one of my subsequent agents) she didn't consider it her job to edit. That was the publisher's job. If a book was good enough, she would sell it. Beyond that, the editorial relationship was with the publisher.

Not so lucky after all.

Half way through the publishing process, the Bodley Head was taken over by what was then Century, an imprint of mega conglomerate Random House. What had been a thoughtful Bodley Head style novel, about a cross cultural marriage, was published as a beach bonkbuster and sank without trace. It was an early lesson in the power of branding. And the disaster of the wrong branding. My editor at the time, with whom I had no quarrel, wrote to me later to say that she felt guilty about what had happened to my novel, and the knock on effect on my career. 

Still, with Pat's encouragement, I embarked on a new project. 

Back on cloud nine.

That novel was - in essence - The Amber Heart. It wasn't titled that back then. I think it was called Noon Ghosts. It was an epic and passionate love story, a family saga, very loosely inspired by what I knew of episodes from my own family history, not least a somewhat scandalous liaison between an aristocratic forebear and her estate manager. 

To my relief, Pat loved it. She quickly sent it out and the response was wonderful. She related some of the reader and editor comments to me. 'I literally could not put this book down,' one of them said. 'I read it through the night and wept buckets at the end.'

There were lots in the same vein. They loved it and said so. Cloud nine loomed.

Pat couldn't sell it. 

Too foreign.

You know what the stumbling block was? 

It was the Polish setting. 

It always fell at the last editorial hurdle. The consensus in every publishing house she tried (and there were already diminishing numbers of possibilities what with all the corporate takeovers) was that nobody would want to read a piece of historical fiction set in Poland, especially one that was aimed at a largely female readership, never mind that some of those same readers had compared it to a Polish Gone with the Wind, never mind that it was a big, sexy, enticing love story.  It was too foreign and that was that.

Years later, Pat told me how frustrated she had been that she couldn't sell the novel. For her too, it was the 'one that got away'. 

Sadly, she died far too young. I put the manuscript away, stored all the research in a big box under the bed, and got on with other writing. 

A compulsive teller of tales.

I forged a pretty successful career as a playwright. But simultaneously, I was working on more novels, finding the pull of fiction irresistible. Many have now been published - beautifully - by Saraband. But I'm a compulsive teller of tales, so I finished up with more novels than Saraband could ever reasonably publish. 

Three in particular fell through the cracks in the publishing business: Ice Dancing, Bird of Passage (of which more in another post) and The Amber Heart. 

Curiously, and rather sadly, I think these three are among the best things I've ever written, and I don't say that lightly. Other people have told me so too. But of these, Bird of Passage and The Amber Heart are big novels and not just in terms of length. Of everything I've written, these three books have never been close to being published in traditional form. Bird of Passage and Ice Dancing haven't even been read by traditional publishers. 

Meanwhile, I had retyped the manuscript of The Amber Heart. You can tell how long this has been going on by the fact that its first faded incarnation was on that old fashioned perforated computer paper that ancient printers spat out in long reams. I expanded it, wondering if it would make a trilogy. Didn't like it at all as a trilogy. Filed it away on the computer, instead of in the box under the bed. Lost the file. Found it. Opened it up. Cut and edited it. A lot.

Pruning and shaping.

Throughout this time, I had several agents and lost them through no fault of my own. Two, at least, just left the business. All of them read The Amber Heart in its various incarnations, liked it very much, but still pointed out that nobody wanted to read a piece of fiction set in Poland. Two of them read it, praised it and told me that it needed pruning. They were right about that, at least, but the problem was that they recommended cutting quite different parts of the novel: one wanted me to lose the first third, while another wanted me to lose the last third. My very last agent was madly enthusiastic about it, but disappeared into the scenery before he could even send it out. 

I published it as an eBook with Amazon. That was about 2012. 

A few years later, I decided that it was indeed much too long. Unpublished it. Let it lie fallow while I wrote other things.

Most writers will have at least one book like this. I have several very early novels. I look at them from time to time and find them an interesting stage in my development, but - in the conventional words of the standard rejection letter these days - I don't love them. So why didn't I give up with this one? 

I've asked myself this more than once over the years. I suppose the answer came to me when, over this pandemic year, spent mostly at my desk, I realised that Pat and all those readers had been right. It is a good book. But the others were right too. It was much too long. Stodgy in places. Going back to it, years later, and with a lot more experience as a writer, I could see clearly enough that it needed pruning and rewriting. Just not the kind of pruning that destroys the whole tree. I took about fifteen thousand words out of it. Here, there and everywhere. I was drastic in places, but always careful not to destroy it completely. I killed a few darlings. I think now it's tighter, more readable, less verbose. More accessible. A better book.

I'm still in love with my main characters. Still love the story. And I'm still quite proud of some of the writing in it. Especially the bit about the dangerous birth ...

Moving on.

My other reason for re-publishing this now is that I'm currently working on a piece of narrative non-fiction, in a similar vein to A Proper Person to be Detained, but this time about my Polish grandfather, his life and milieu. I'm deep into research and planning for a new book called The Last Lancer. And it seems relevant. I got the big box of pre-internet papers and letters and pictures out from under the bed. Pandora's box, in a way because this all feels very personal.

My last, my very, very last enquiry to an agent referencing this proposed new book (why on earth did I do it?) elicited the faintly bored response that there were so many similar stories out there. Since my grandfather was born in Poland in a sleigh, grew up to look like a bit like a younger version of Olivier's Maxim de Winter, was a cavalryman who drove a Lagonda and died young at Bukhara on the silk road, I suspect that there aren't all that many similar stories out there, but who knows? Maybe there are.

All the same, if I ever again publicly express a desire to find an agent, you will know that it's code for 'I've been kidnapped. Send help immediately.'

So there we are. And here it is. While I'm hard at work on the Last Lancer, if you like deeply romantic historical tales of love and loss (and cake. There's quite a lot of cake in this book), you could do worse than give The Amber Heart a try. 

It will be reduced to 99p here in the UK and also in the US from 21st December till 28th December, so grab a bargain, and escape into another time and place for a while!

Writing Christmas

This piece of furniture, dated 1626, is 200 years old than the house!

I'm still in the middle of Christmas preparations here in this small Scottish village where I live and work. The tree is trimmed and so is the house. This old house seems to enjoy Christmas as much as we do. 200 years and the stones themselves seem to appreciate holly, ivy, the softness of candlelight. Whenever we have a powercut - and it happens from time to time in very windy weather -  I always feel that the house really loves a return to candlelight. You can almost feel it settling down with a sigh of contentment. And if you're as imaginative as I am, you can sense some of those previous inhabitants too, although the house has always felt peculiarly calm and happy.

It's a house in which people have stayed for a long time.

Sometimes, in a world where the news seems to be a constant barrage of devastating tragedy, political hatreds masquerading as religion, and misery of all kinds, this community seems like a sanctuary of sorts. Not always - because what place is? But mostly. And sometimes all you can do is gather friends and family about you, love and care for those closest to you, and hope, somehow, that the light spreads a little.

The old Polish setting for my novel: The Amber Heart

I miss my late mum and dad at Christmas. Well, I miss them all year round. But Dad loved Christmas and we always celebrated in the Polish as well as the British way. Christmas Eve was magical and a little of that magic still remains.

So when I was thinking about a Christmas 'special offer' for my readers, the book that came to mind was my novel set in mid nineteenth century Poland: The Amber Heart.

It isn't wholly set in winter, of course. There are plenty of summer scenes, plenty of Easter celebrations. But when I think of it, it seems to be a snowy landscape that comes into my mind. So much of it was based on the stories about my family that dad had told me over the years. I wrote them as fiction of course, changed them, shaped them, wove them into a different story entirely.

The Amber Heart is set in mid 19th century Eastern Europe - an unfamiliar but magical setting. It  follows the fortunes of an array of characters whose lives are disrupted by the turmoil of the times. But first and foremost it's a love story.

Maryanna is a Polish landowner’s pampered daughter, born and brought up in the beautiful 'pancake yellow' house of Lisko, while Piotro is a poor Ukrainian estate worker. The lives of these two people from vastly different backgrounds are destined to become hopelessly and tragically entwined from the fatal moment of their first meeting. 

At one point in the  novel - after a series of devastating events - Piotro is travelling hopelessly, painfully on foot, through a wintry landscape, when he is given traditional hospitality by a Polish family on Christmas Eve: 

'After the meal there followed a convivial few hours with vodka and violin music. One or two of the women lead the company in singing traditional Christmas songs. They were mostly sweet and sad lullabies to the Christ Child: ‘sleep baby Jesus, my little pearl, sleep my heart’s darling.’ Piotro recognised the melodies and even knew the words of some of them, but he was shy of singing aloud and he only mouthed the words along with the singers. They made him sad, brought a lump to his throat, though he couldn’t have said why.'

For the week beginnning 24th December, The Amber Heart will be on special offer in Amazon's Kindle Store - a big book at a bargain price. Or here, if you're reading this in the US. A good, long Christmas read. 

Meanwhile, let me take this opportunity to wish all my readers and subscribers a very happy Christmas and may the New Year bring you all you could wish for yourselves. 

The Amber Heart: a Big, Sexy, Old-Fashioned Historical Romance?

Cover art by Claire Maclean

The novel has been called all the above things at one time or another. It's certainly a love story and it's certainly a historical novel. Set in 19th Century Poland, The Amber Heart is the passionate (and at times explicit) love story of two people whose lives will be inextricably and hopelessly entwined.

Maryanna Diduska is the spoilt only daughter of a wealthy Polish landowner. Piotro Bandura is the son of a poverty-stricken Ukrainian peasant. Their paths should never cross. But fate has other ideas.

In one sense at least, the armies of traditional publishers who were wary of acquiring The Amber Heart were perfectly right.  I had no idea just how firmly the notion of Poland as a grim ex-communist concrete jungle, famous only for exporting plumbers and plasterers to the UK, had become so firmly rooted in the national consciousness.The big publishers, so market oriented, were all too well aware of it, and although I could paper a wall with fabulous rave rejections - I love this, it made me cry, I stayed up all night reading it, what a wonderful book - nobody would actually take it on. A string of editors told my agent that, much as they, personally, liked it, they had no idea how to market it, and perhaps they had a point.  But this is neither a complaint nor a rant - just an explanation of sorts.

You see my perception of Poland was different. For me, throughout my childhood, it seemed like a romantic other-worldly place, as remote and magical as a land in a fairytale. The fact that my visions were just as skewed in their own way - that the truth lay somewhere between the two -  is neither here not there, because we're talking about inspiration here: that impulse to tell a story and what lay behind it.


My late father had almost literally been Prince Charming to my mum's post war Yorkshire Cinderella. One day I'll bring the Amber Heart up to date by telling their story but for now, this will have to do.

My dad, looking a bit girly, with his parents at Dziedzilow

My dark and handsome dad had been born into a certain amount of privilege, much like Maryanna in my story, but he lost everything in the war. After a dangerous time as a young courier for the Resistance, followed by a spell in a German prison camp, he came to Helmsley in Yorkshire with a Polish tank unit, part of the British army. That first wave of Poles inspired a certain amount of prejudice, even then. After he was demobbed, he went to Leeds where he worked in a mill as a textile presser. He also met my mum at a dance. He was thin and pale and faintly heroic. She had a cold sore on her lip and her hair was tied back with a bootlace but they maintained that it was love at first sight. I suspect it was - and for both of them, it would last a lifetime. 

My Aunt Vera, dad, my mum, Kathleen on the right, and myself in the sun hat.

In truth, they were a handsome couple. She was pretty. He was exotic and charming. He kissed her hand and clicked his heels together when they met. Even his accent was deeply attractive. She had never met anyone quite like him in sooty Holbeck where she lived, the youngest - also spoilt - daughter of a big family. Her father worked in a tailoring factory and sold maggots to fishermen for bait in his spare time. Her Irish mother ran a tiny sweet and tobacconist's shop whose main customers were the factory workers who passed by morning and evening.  If this reads like a family saga, it's because it is.

Me, in pale blue organdie.

Growing up

Fortunately, my dad turned out to be as lovely as his manners. He was creative, kindly, and clever. They married and by the time I was born, he was attending night school so that he could get out of the mill. At his retiral, he was a distinguished research biochemist who had travelled the world as an expert adviser for Unido. But back then, I think he was just relieved to be alive and in a reasonably peaceful place.
He didn't say much about his wartime experiences, but what he did say was harrowing. And for quite a while, he wasn't well: thin and grey faced and somehow attenuated. Now, I can see that it must have been a reaction to everything that had happened to him. Back then, I was worried about him, as even young children can be - vaguely and without really knowing why.


I remember being carried on his shoulders, and touching his black curls. I remember him telling me stories and teaching me to draw and taking me off into the countryside around Leeds every weekend, to show me things: a wasps' nest, a grass snake, flowers, birds, trees. I remember going to some church event with mum and dad and dancing with him, proudly, like a grown-up. I wore an organdie dress with little blue rosebuds and had my hair up. I stood on his feet and he waltzed me around in time to the music. 

The Poland he told me about was - of course - the rural Eastern Poland of his childhood, a place called Dziedzilow. This was by no means an idyllic place, beset as it was by bloody battles, constant border skirmishes and the occasional massacre. And my grandparents' marriage was not a happy one either, in spite of their comparative affluence. But I think dad had a happy childhood all the same, because the Poland he described for me, weaving countless stories, was as strange and foreign and magical as a place in a fairytale. I recognised it for what it was, the first time I encountered Housman's poem:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

For dad, surely, Dziedzilow (I call it Lisko in the book - you can understand why, can't you?) was the land of lost content where he knew he could never come again. He was never bitter, tucking the memories away inside him, just happy to have survived.

Dad with goat.

And of course writers do come there again in their imaginations. I mined my father's experiences when I was writing the Amber Heart as surely as he had once mined his memories for his little daughter. Oh, I did a lot of other research besides. A truly prodigous amount, most of which simply informs the story, rather than being inserted into it. But it was my dad's voice I went back to time and again when I wanted to feel how it might have been. I went visiting with him in my imagination, and there it was. I could see it, smell it, touch it. Dad died back in 1995 but I still feel the connection sometimes. I felt it especially when I was writing this novel.

Wojciech Kossak, one of my forebears, painted this. Another inspiration for me.

Reviewing The Amber Heart for the Indie eBook Review, Cally Phillips says 'There is passion, brutality and deep emotion on display as we are whisked through the nineteenth century and the long lives and deaths of a panoply of characters.'

As an adult, I came to realise that the passion and the brutality were always there, a muted subtext to so many of the stories (as they are in so many 'fairy stories') changed and transformed by my gentle dad to delight his little Kasia - my Polish name. I was never disturbed by them, but I think I recognised the deep emotion and the vivid memories that lay behind them. I think many of them have found their way into the Amber Heart which begins a hundred years before my father was even born. In a way, I think that those editors were right. It probably is a big, sexy, old fashioned historical romance. With a setting which may not be immediately popular. But still, it's quite a story. It'll be free on Kindle, here in the UK and here in the USA, on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd August 2012. Why not give it a try?

Dad with student.