Ice Dancing - The Story Behind the Story.

 

Cover image by Michal Piasecki

Of all the books and stories and plays I've ever written, I find myself going back to Ice Dancing again and again. It's a love story, but it also tackles a serious and troubling issue that never seems to go away. When I was describing it for publication, I called it a 'very grown-up love story' and that's certainly what it is. 

When he was young, my son learned to skate, here in Scotland, and then played ice hockey for a number of years. He only stopped because playing hockey 'just for fun' is difficult in this country, and the demands of school work and his other passion at the time - karate - meant that something had to go, and that something was hockey. He enjoyed it very much, but he knew that it was never going to be a career. Later, living and working in Sweden, he went back to it for a while, as the hobby sport he had enjoyed. 

As an adolescent, he had a fine Canadian coach, one who cared about all the kids, whether they were good or not, a coach who commanded the kind of respect that made the parents on the sidelines behave themselves - in short, a model teacher. 

At the same time, we were hearing about other kinds of coaches, in this and in other sports. Coaches who were not at all trustworthy. Coaches who would come to give the sport a bad name. 

The other day, a nice, kind, trusting person of my acquaintance remarked on social media that she would always trust people when they told her who or what they were. Having grown up in a loving and protective family, I used to feel the same. Unfortunately, life taught me, as sooner or later it teaches all of us, that there are people in the world who tell you only what they want you to hear. And then, when they behave badly, manipulate you for their own ends, you find it incredibly difficult to accept the betrayal. It's not nice to feel that you've been deceived. Not at all nice to surrender at least some of your trust in the innate goodness of people. 

I've written about betrayal rather often: sometimes a betrayal of friendship or love, sometimes the terrible betrayal of trust between adults and children. 

Many years ago, having had two successful and well reviewed full length productions at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, I submitted a new play which attempted to tackle this kind of betrayal, only to have it turned down. They were quite within their rights, and it may not even have been a very good play - but I was hurt at the abruptness of the rejection when I had worked so hard for them in the past. 'I hope they nurture this new talent' one distinguished theatre critic had written. Some hopes. 

I felt that I was surely owed a discussion of some kind. Perhaps questions about why I had wanted to tackle this possibly contentious and uncomfortable subject. None of that happened. What happened was that I got a short, abrupt, almost embarrassed note, saying 'not for us.' After which, I was 'ghosted' by someone I had thought of as a friend before ghosting was really a thing. When I look back on it now, I still find something disturbing about the finality of it. It was as though I had committed a terrible faux pas in writing about something unmentionable. 

Year passed, I began to write far more fiction than plays, and eventually I wrote Ice Dancing, set in a small lowland Scottish village - a grown-up love story that was about much more than the central relationship. It was a story that went back to that original play, and its themes, about male athletes in particular and what happened to some of them. 

Even then, no traditional publisher was remotely interested, even though they were publishing some of my other novels. So here it is, under my own imprint, and doing rather well. 

If you're curious, you can get it on Kindle for a bargain price of 99p for a couple of days! 

Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges.

They're here! - the first two books in my Canary Isles trilogy: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. 

As I told you in a previous post, these novels have had a long and chequered past. I first wrote the story - or something like it - many years ago, when I spent two winters with my husband, artist Alan Lees, living in the Canaries. Alan was skippering a charter yacht, a big, beautiful catamaran called Simba.

The first year, I lived aboard the boat and helped take care of our customers. I also got pregnant. By the time we came back the following winter, it was with our six week old son. We borrowed an apartment in Los Cristianos from a friend, while Alan worked, and I spent several blissful months looking after Charlie in a child-friendly place. My parents and then Alan's mum flew down to help. 

But our real love was La Gomera. It was where we had taken our visitors. It was where we went for sweet, clean water for the boat And it was a place we explored ourselves, loving everything about it. It was also where I wrote the first drafts of this story, which would become a radio play and an unsatisfactory novel that was published so badly that my then editor later wrote to me to apologise for the violence they had done to my subtle story of a cross cultural relationship. 

I filed it away under bitter experience, but then, decades later, with my own imprint (Dyrock Publishing) as well as a good many traditionally published books under my belt, I thought I would try again. My two main characters - Luis and Margaret - just wouldn't sit down and shut up. I loved them far too much to let them go. 

A couple of years ago, I published the first part, under the title Orange Blossoms, but quite soon, took it down again, because I still wasn't very happy with it. If you look for the new version, Hera's Orchard, you'll find its previous title in the book description. I did quite a bit of rewriting and editing, although if you are one of the few people who bought and read Orange Blossoms, don't worry. If you want to know what happens next, you can pick up exactly where you left off, and find out what becomes of the marriage, in Bitter Oranges. 

You can also download a freebie of the eBook of Hera's Orchard from 9th - 13th April, so if you want to check out the new version, you'll be able to do that as well. 

Bitter Oranges is the sequel and you'll find it as an eBook or a paperback. 

I knew what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to write about a 'holiday romance gone wrong' or a scammer, or an untrustworthy foreigner, or all the other tropes that seem to crop up again and again in UK fiction and drama. I wanted to write a genuine love story, but more than that, I wanted to write a love story about two people from very different backgrounds. Luis says 'soy un buen hombre' and so he is. Let's face it - love and marriage can be challenging enough, even for good men and women, if they come from very different cultures. If they speak different languages. Languages that perhaps shape their thoughts differently. 

Brexit added yet another horrible layer of complexity and potential trouble, one I certainly didn't foresee when I was writing that first radio play, but one which I had to tackle head on in these new books. 

Does it work out? What do you think? 

Both these lovely covers images are by my talented husband. 

Canary Island Novels - Coming Soon.

 

Miel de Palma from La Gomera

Unusually, I've been neglecting this blog. 

We had a small interruption from Storm Eowyn when we lost all power, including heating, for three chilly days, played a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble by candlelight but eventually had to take refuge in a hotel for one happy night. We stayed in a wonderful old hotel in Ayr called The Chestnuts, and I can recommend it if you're ever looking for somewhere to stay or just to eat. They were beyond welcoming - even putting an extra heater in the room to thaw us out. The bed was incredibly comfortable, the food was fabulous and the staff were kind and helpful. I wish we could have stayed on for a few more nights, but Scottish Power turned up and switched everything on again so we had to go home. 

Anyway, the knock on effect of that was a certain amount of delay with my latest project, which involves the first two novels in what I hope will be a trilogy of books set in the gorgeous Canary Isles, but especially on one of my favourite places of all time - La Gomera. 

There is a long and complicated story to these Canary Island novels, which I'll write about in a later post. We had a couple of blissful winters there when my husband was working as a yacht charter skipper. I've spent the past few months editing the first two books in the series. And then editing them again. And again. Ever more reluctant to let them go.

Essentially, it's the story of a cross-cultural relationship and I suppose one of the other inspirations behind it was my parents' own long and loving marriage. Mum was from a working class Leeds Irish family. Dad was a refugee from an aristocratic landowning Polish family. They met at the dancing in Leeds. And they never ever stopped loving each other. 

Much later, when I wanted to write about this kind of relationship, albeit in quite a different setting, I started on these books. It was a rocky road and it has taken years and several incarnations including a radio play.  Latterly, I think I just couldn't bear to leave the people and the setting, so because I too want to know what happens next, there will have to be a third novel.

In many ways it's a simple love story - but with inevitable complications. 

Anyway, now that the files are off to the designer, they'll be coming out soon as eBooks and paperbacks: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. Watch this space for more about them.

Good friends have just come back from La Gomera, and they brought us a bottle of Miel de Palma - palm honey, which is a sweet syrup produced from the sap of palm trees - and delicious. A very fitting taste of the island where we spent some of the happiest times of our life and where - in some alternate universe - we might still be living. 

 

Ice Dancing - A Very Grown Up Love Story

Cover image by Michal Piasecki

My novel, Ice Dancing, will be free on Amazon Kindle for the next five days, beginning tomorrow, 31st December, so if you're at a loose end over the New Year holiday, you might like to give it a try. And - if you enjoy it - reward me with a short review, or at least some stars! Because it really makes a difference to how Amazon promotes our work. 

It's set in a small village in rural lowland Scotland. As I've said to a few friends, it's 'inspired by' the place I live, in that I know exactly what it's like living in a small Scottish village.  Nevertheless, all the characters are entirely fictional. 

The story involves an attractive newcomer and his effect on a small community where more or less everyone knows everyone else, or thinks they do. But the seemingly glamorous stranger has a more difficult and disturbing past than the village - and one inhabitant in particular - could ever imagine. 

You'll find it on Amazon with a gorgeous cover by Polish photographer (based in Scotland) Michal Piasecki. 

Click on the title below for the UK link or search for it in other countries. 

Ice Dancing.

The Amber Heart: Free for Three Days Only!

 

My big beautiful Polish saga, The Amber Heart, is free on Amazon Kindle for three days: Thursday 10th, Friday 11th and Saturday 12th October . This was another book that struggled to find a publisher, even when they were publishing other work of mine, mostly because 'nobody is interested in Poland' they said. 

One editor reported that she loved the novel, couldn't put it down and had 'wept buckets' but they 'couldn't take sales with them'. Incidentally, that's another way not to be a writer. If you really don't want to be a writer, make sure you're Polish, living in Britain. Here in the UK, Poland is a very long way away. They do things differently there and nobody wants to read about them. Well, according to most traditional publishers, anyway! I like my Polish citizenship. My dual nationality. But my longing  to write about Poland has done me no favours at all as a writer.

All the same, I think you might enjoy The Amber Heart if you like a good epic love story set during a time of great turbulence. I hope it's accessible and understandable. and besides, people are always falling in love when they shouldn't.  

Unlike Bird of Passage, which nobody would even look at, various agents and editors did look at this one. Two of them suggested that I cut a third out of it. The trouble was that one suggested the first third and the other suggested the last third. One of these was one of my 'disappearing agents'. I had two of them who simply went missing, never to be seen or heard from again. Ultimately, I did some serious pruning but no big chunks. The story needed those 'thirds'. Just a bit less of them. 

You may be interested to know that the story in the novel is very loosely based on truth, and if you want to know more about the real thing, you could read my account of my father's family in eastern Poland - the Last Lancer. My great grandfather Wladyslaw Czerkawski died, my great granny Anna was left a young widow with five children, and she married her estate manager. It was something of a scandal at the time. But not half as much of a scandal as the events of the Amber Heart, which is set more than half a century earlier. 

It's our wedding anniversary on Thursday and we've been together for a very long time. So this is a little gift from me to anyone who thinks they might like to read it. Paperbacks are available, but the freebie only applies to Kindle. If you haven't already read it, I hope you enjoy it!

Great granny Anna

The Amber Heart - The Long, Long Story of a Story and Pardon Me While I Scream.

Yesterday, a friend who had just read my new book The Last Lancer, was telling me that she had enjoyed reading it - but she didn't love it as much as one of my novels called The Amber Heart. She went on to tell me how and why she loved it, which is always cheering for an author to hear. And perhaps doubly so, when it was praise for a novel with a long and chequered history. 

Now that it's available as an eBook and in paperback, at long last, I think it's time to revisit the tale of how we got here, what inspired it - and what the connection is with the true story of The Last Lancer. 

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' (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.

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 should have been a thoughtful, typical Bodley Head 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. That new novel was - in essence - The Amber Heart. 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, one which you can read all about in The Last Lancer. Knowing that at some point in the future, I might want to tackle the true story of that relationship, I deliberately set my fictional love story in the previous century. 

To my relief, Pat approved. She quickly sent it out and the responses were 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. 

And she could have sold sand in the desert. 

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) 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 and ultimately tragic 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. I forged a pretty successful career as a playwright but I was also working on more novels, finding the pull of fiction irresistible. Many have now been published by Saraband. 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 and, of course, The Amber Heart.  Sadly and inexplicably, I think these three are among the best books I've written, and I don't say that lightly. Other people have told me so too. 

Time passed. 

I found and retyped the old 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 old fashioned perforated computer paper - the kind that ancient printers spat out in long reams. I expanded it, wondering if it would make a trilogy. Realised that the answer was no. Filed it away on the computer, instead of in the box under the bed. Changed computers. Lost the file. Found it. Opened it up. Cut and edited it. A lot.

Throughout this time, I had several agents. One left the business. One of them decided that she could make more money with other clients (true) and jettisoned me.  My last agent was enthusiastic, but he  disappeared before he could send it out. For all I know he may have gone out for a loaf and never come home because I never heard from him again. 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 told me that it needed pruning. They were right about that, at least, but the problem was that one wanted me to lose the first third, while another wanted me to lose the last third. 

So why didn't I give up?

The answer came to me when, over lockdown, 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 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 killed a few darlings. I think now it's tighter, more readable, less verbose. 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. Interestingly, I did this while I was deep into research for The Last Lancer, just published by Saraband. My very last enquiry to an agent referencing this proposed new non-fiction book (why on earth did I do it?) elicited the faintly bored response that there were 'so many similar stories out there'. That was not long before the Russian invasion. Since my grandfather was born in what is now Ukraine, in a sleigh, grew up to look like a younger version of Olivier's Maxim de Winter, was a cavalryman who drove a Chrysler and died at the age of 38, at Bukhara on the Silk Road, I suspect that there aren't all that many similar stories out there, but what do I know?

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.'

Meanwhile, Saraband were at the London Book Fair. I'd have thought the Last Lancer might have been a good candidate for translation into Polish and publication in that country. Poles certainly keep telling me so. And I just got a heartening and glowing testimonial from my hero Neal Ascherson. But my publisher reported no interest in it. 'All the focus is now on Ukraine,' they said. Which is, of course, where the book is set, exploring the troubled history of that region through the history of one family.

Pardon me while I go away and scream.

Before I do though, you can download the Amber Heart as an eBook for the bargain price of 99p, from May 12th to May 19th. It's available in paperback as well. And if you want to know where the idea for the love story at the heart of that novel came from, you might like to read The Last Lancer as well. 

Bird of Passage: my Wuthering Heights inspired novel on special offer.

      

Cover art by Alan Lees

My novel Bird of Passage will be on special offer at 99p for the Kindle eBook version, for a whole week, from late on 14th October to the 21st October. If you haven't already read it, do grab a bargain. If you'd prefer the paperback, you'll find that here (at full price, I'm afraid, but it's a nicely produced book and a long one!) 

After all, what else can you do at this miserable time of year, with the country's economy crumbling around us, but bury yourself in a book? I plan to do the same thing, but I'll be writing something new as well.

Over all the years of my writing career, and even though I've been happily published by Saraband  for some time now, with my new non-fiction book, The Last Lancer, due to be published in 2023, there were two or three fairly early novels that I always thought of as the 'ones that got away'. 

Until I took the decision to publish it myself, it had always been my orphan child, the book that a few people read and enjoyed, but that nobody in the industry wanted. Unlike The Amber Heart, that kept being turned down with fulsome praise, because 'nobody is interested in Poland', which seemed in theory at least to be a credible marketing decision back in the 1980s, no agent or publisher would even read Bird of Passage, in spite of its Scottish setting and Irish background, and in spite of the fact that it tackles some harrowing issues that are still very much current. In short, it was turned down unseen. I should add that I can't blame my current publisher for this. There is only so much work that an individual independent publisher can deal with and had Saraband seen it earlier, they might well have taken it. But by the time they became 'my' publisher, there was more work ready to go, more work I wanted to write specifically for them. Writing careers are tricky like that. 

In the case of Bird of Passage, back when I was still sending out submissions, I suspect the kiss of death as far as agents and publishers alike were concerned, was the Wuthering Heights connection. Later, I wondered if I should have been so up-front about it. Perhaps I should never have mentioned it. But surely they would have noticed the faint parallels? Or maybe not. 

Anyway, in all my innocence, I gave the game away. And that was the rock I perished on. No matter how much I was at pains to say that this wasn't a rewriting of the incomparable original, (how would I dare?) but was a kind of homage to it, nobody in my industry believed me enough to read it and see for themselves. 

Wuthering Heights was my late mother’s favourite novel. I was a Yorkshire lass, although one with a rich Polish and (like Emily) a rich Irish heritage as well. We lived in Leeds until I was twelve years old. You can read more about my family background in a book called A Proper Person to be Detained (Saraband 2019), part personal memoir, part family history. I was named for the heroine of Wuthering Heights, a doubtful compliment some might say, and I was trundled over the moors in my push-chair to Top Withens, the setting for the Heights in the novel, if not for the house itself. As soon as I was old enough to read and begin to understand the novel, I fell in love with it, although I soon realised that it was a powerful and absorbing evocation of a cruelly obsessive love, with very little of romance about it. Since then, I have reread it almost every year, and have found more to marvel at with every reading. 

I'm not alone. I know plenty of people who are similarly obsessed with Wuthering Heights. And here we are again, with a new film, Emily, in cinemas from tomorrow ... 

 

But to return to Bird of Passage. Cue forward some years, and after a spell of writing for the stage, I began to focus almost wholly on fiction, with occasional ventures into non-fiction. Although most of my work since then has been beautifully published by Saraband, I still kept going back to Bird of Passage. Most writers have ‘bottom drawer’ novels: the books that you write before you are published. I have several, and most of them should never see the light of day. 

Like the Amber Heart, Bird of Passage always felt different. Felt like irritatingly unfinished business. I kept going back to it. Tinkering. Leaving it alone. Thinking about it. It haunted my dreams. It was as though these characters wanted desperately to tell their story. Back then, I still had an agent, but I had other work waiting for submission, and Bird of Passage languished on the far recesses of my PC. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody had the time to read it. Nobody cared except me. 

All the same, I couldn't get Finn and Kirsty out of my mind, so when I took the decision to combine some self publishing with my traditional publishing, this was one of three novels that I felt deserved another life beyond the confines of my computer and my own imagination. That was when I tackled it in a big way, with all the benefit that so much experience of writing and editing can bring. Suddenly, I knew exactly how I wanted it to be, exactly how the story should be told. When it was finally published, one of my reviewers wrote that it is a 'reimagining' of Wuthering Heights at a different time and in a different place. It is a good way of describing it, and that is perhaps as close as it gets to Emily's masterpiece.

The cover, designed by my artist husband, is exactly what I wanted, and seems to reflect the story as accurately as possible. It's a grown up story set mostly in the Scottish countryside, exploring the kind of mutual passion that is attractive in theory but ultimately destructive. It's a novel about the nature of obsessive love and the terrible, irreparable damage of childhood trauma.

If you love Wuthering Heights (or even if you don't) and if this sounds like your kind of novel, why not give it a try? 

The Amber Heart - The Story of a Story - and a Valentine Freebie.

 

I've blogged before about my new book, The Last Lancer, the story of my grandfather's life and milieu.  It's currently with my publisher, awaiting edits, while I sit here watching developments in Ukraine with a sick sense of deja vu. 

Meanwhile, here's one I wrote earlier. The Amber Heart is set in the middle years of the 19th century, in what was then rural Eastern Poland  It's the story of Marianna and Danilo. She is a wealthy Polish landowner's daughter, born and brought up in the beautiful manor house of Lisko, while he is a poor Ukrainian estate worker. The lives of these two young people from vastly different backgrounds are destined to become hopelessly and tragically entwined from the moment of their first meeting. 

Back when I wrote the first draft of this novel, I had a good London based agent. I'd just had a novel published, and she was confident that she would be able to sell this one as well. I thought so too. Our confidence couldn't have been more misplaced. 

There were a lot more publishers in the 80s, although the Great Amalgamation had already begun, in which so many good small publishers were swallowed up by big corporations, gradually reducing the options for publication and the options for writers too. At the same time, and probably no coincidence, the so called 'mid-list' was disappearing - those well written, readable books that were never going to be mega sellers, but still sold steadily over many years, if they were kept in print. Which wasn't what the big corporations wanted at all. 

Desperate times, until Amazon, the Great Disrupter, saw not just a gap but a yawning chasm in the market and went for it like the proverbial rat up a drainpipe. Good for them. Now, smaller independent publishers are springing up, but they have a hard row to hoe, and so do writers. A  whole publishing infrastructure was destroyed in the rush to consolidate traditional publishing houses into ever bigger entities.

My agent couldn't sell the novel,  no matter how hard she tried, but it had - as she herself said - the most fulsomely complimentary set of rejections she had ever seen. One editor said she had 'stayed up all night reading it, couldn't put it down, wept buckets.' 

The stumbling block seemed to be its Polish setting. Nobody wanted to read a novel set in Poland, they said. 

Dear reader, I filed that original manuscript away in a box, where it sat mouldering for years. I still have that copy somewhere, out of pure sentimentality. It's on old flimsy paper,  typed - as far as I remember - on an early IBM Word Processor. 

I pressed on with my radio drama career and my theatre career, and even when I went back to novels and had some success - originally with a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet that is still in print with its gorgeous Saraband cover and many glowing reviews - I occasionally thought about chucking the Amber Heart in the bin. But I would start to read it, and realise that there was something about it ... something about Poland too. I wrote a stage play about the rise of Solidarity and three radio plays with Polish settings: Gnats, Amber and Noon Ghosts. 

Many years later, the novel was still nagging away at me. In between projects, I got down that faded manuscript and typed it up again. It's a long book and it was a big task, since I was editing as I went. In between times, I had acquired another agent. He read this new version and liked it, but suggested deleting the last third. Later, a different agent suggested deleting the first third. It was certainly much too long. Over several years, in between other projects, I reworked it completely in the light of all that I had learned since that first draft, and did, in fact, delete quite a lot of it, but not the beginning or the end! It's still quite a big book. 

Now, I can say with a certain amount of confidence that this is the definitive final draft and I don't intend to edit it ever again. It has to get out there and take its chance. It's on Amazon as an eBook and also as a paperback, designed by the talented Lumphanan Press, so you can take your pick. 

The criticisms I have had of it over the years have mostly been from mostly male Polish historians, who thought there was 'insufficient historical detail' and wanted it to be a factual account of those times. But that wasn't what I was writing, although I think such detail as there is, is accurate. 

Let's hope they like The Last Lancer better, although it's still a saga of conflict, love and loss, albeit a true one, so extraordinary that I could never have made it up. 

Anyway, if you fancy reading the Amber Heart, you can download the eBook free on 14th February (and for the two following days as well), Valentine's day, which seems a pretty good day to offer my readers the gift of a big bold tragic love story. 

Bird of Passage - A New Cover for an Old Book

A couple of weeks ago, I sent a draft of my new book, The Last Lancer, to my publisher, Saraband. I can't say final draft because it isn't. And I can't say first draft either, because it's about the fifth draft so far. It's an in between draft. As good as I can make it for now, but there will probably be more work to be done. It's a piece of non-fiction about the Polish side of my family, more specifically about my grandfather, a man I never knew but always missed. 

But more of that in due course. 

When you've spent two years and more focusing almost exclusively on one project, everything seems very empty. I have a new project in mind but I'm not quite ready to start it yet. My wee office had Quentin Crisp levels of dust and monumental levels of clutter. It took me four days to sort it out and it's a small room. It's still cluttered, but it's clean, and everything is where it should be. 

Then I went back to the various projects I'd neglected while I focused on the new book. 

When I shared a stall with my artist husband at a pre-Christmas fair, I noticed that my novel Bird of Passage attracted far less attention than any of my other books, traditional or independently published. People DO judge a book by its cover. Now I've remedied that, with the help of my husband, Alan Lees, who provided the cover art, and Lumphanan Press, who made a great job of the original formatting, and then redesigned the cover for me. It already looks a lot more attractive. And much more suitable for a novel set mostly on a small Scottish island. 

One or two friends have commented how much they love this novel, and I've thought 'me too'.  But until I took the decision to publish it myself, it had always been my orphan child, the book that nobody in the industry wanted. Unlike the Amber Heart, that kept being turned down with fulsome praise, because 'nobody is interested in Poland', which seemed in theory at least to be a credible marketing decision back in the 1980s, no agent or publisher would even read Bird of Passage, in spite of its Scottish setting and Irish background, and in spite of the fact that it tackles some harrowing issues that are still very much current. In short, it was turned down unseen.

In this case, I suspect the kiss of death was the Wuthering Heights connection. No matter how much I was at pains to say that this wasn't a rewriting of the incomparable original, (how would I dare?) but was a kind of homage to it, nobody in my industry believed me enough to read it and see for themselves. 

Wuthering Heights was my late mother’s favourite novel. I was a Yorkshire lass, although one with a rich Polish and (like Emily) a rich Irish heritage as well. We lived in Leeds until I was twelve years old. You can read more about my family background in a book called A Proper Person to be Detained (Saraband 2019), part personal memoir, part family history. I was named for the heroine of Wuthering Heights, a doubtful compliment some might say, and I was trundled over the moors in my push-chair to Top Withens, the setting for the Heights in the novel, if not for the house itself. As soon as I was old enough to read and begin to understand the novel, I fell in love with it, although I soon realised that it was a powerful and absorbing evocation of a cruelly obsessive love, with very little of romance about it. Since then, I have reread it almost every year, and have found more to marvel at with every reading.

 

Top Withens

Cue forward some years, and after a spell of writing for the stage, I began to focus almost wholly on fiction, with occasional ventures into non-fiction. Most of my work since then has been beautifully published by Saraband. But I still kept going back to Bird of Passage. Most writers have ‘bottom drawer’ novels: the books that you write before you are  published. I have several, and most of them should never see the light of day. Bird of Passage always felt different. Felt like irritatingly unfinished business. 

Back then, I had an agent, but I had other work waiting for submission, and Bird of Passage languished on the far recesses of my PC. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody had the time to read it. Nobody cared except me. 

 All the same, I couldn't get Finn and Kirsty out of my mind so when, some years ago, I took the decision to combine self publishing with traditional publishing, this was one of three novels that I felt deserved another life beyond the confines of my computer and my own imagination. It has done well as an eBook, but the new paperback copies arrived yesterday. The cover is exactly what I wanted, and seems to reflect the story as accurately as possible. It's a grown up story set in Scotland, exploring the kind of mutual passion that is attractive in theory but ultimately destructive. It's a novel about the nature of obsessive love and the terrible damage of childhood trauma, all set within a landscape that is almost a character in itself. 

If this sounds like your kind of novel, give it a try. 

Loving Ayrshire

 

It's no secret that I love Ayrshire. We moved from Leeds, years ago, when I was twelve, and my biochemist father got a job in a research institute here. I never enjoyed school much, even though I did quite well academically - but I adored the countryside and history of this lush, green and, let's face it, rainy county. If you can put up with the rain, it's considerably warmer than the rest of Scotland, and warmer than much of Northern England. Winters are much milder than in my native Leeds. 

Holidaymakers tend to pass it by in the mad rush for the Highlands, but the scenery is spectacular and the history is fascinating. Not surprisingly then, it has featured in at least some of my fiction, in novels such as The Jewel and Ice Dancing, as well as in many of the radio plays I used to write, notably a couple of series: The Peggers and the Creelers and Running Before the Wind. I'm planning a new series of novels even as I write this, and guess where they are mostly going to be set? 

I was happy to be asked to record a reading for this year's Tidelines Festival and chose a passage from the Jewel, about an early encounter between our very own Robert Burns and the woman who was destined to become his wife, and who was quite clearly the love of his life: Jean Armour. I didn't much want to record myself just sitting on a rock reading and my tech skills weren't up to recording myself walking and reading on a smartphone - so I included a sheaf of my own pictures of Ayrshire, as well as some lovely watercolour images from a Victorian artist called Janet Muir, who lived in Mauchline. Nice to see that the person putting the video together worked a bit of magic on them all. 

Anyway - here it is. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and watch the whole Love Ayrshire video. You'll find me, and a sheaf of other Ayrshire writers too. 

Ice Dancing - My Scottish Village Novel (with a bit of Ice Hockey thrown in for good measure!)

 

Cover image by Alan Lees

This week, my slightly quirky love story, Ice Dancing, is being serialised in the Dundee Courier. It seems appropriate for that newspaper, since not only is Ice Dancing set in and around a small rural Scottish village - and Dundee has a rural hinterland - but a theme of Ice Hockey, players and fans, runs through the novel and Dundee is a good hockey town. 

All the same, you don't have to know anything about the sport to enjoy it, because the novel's narrator, farmer's wife, Helen, knows nothing at all about it either, till she meets Joe, a visiting Canadian Ice Hockey player. Then she finds out all about it.

The book was a labour of love for me. I never expected it to be particularly successful. I just wanted to write it (probably the best of all reasons for writing anything) but to my surprise, I find that people who find it and read it seem to love it too. I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the hockey. It has more to do with what turned out to be a fairly sharp-eyed but loving observation of the realities of village life. After all, and with occasional spells elsewhere, I've lived in a rural Scottish village for some 40 years. And, as one lovely reviewer pointed out, it's about the realities of love and desire at first sight as well. 

The reason for the title, which gives me no end of trouble when people think it's a how-to manual, will become very clear if you read the novel! 

You can download it as an eBook here and as a paperback here. If you're reading this in the USA you should be able to find it on Amazon there as well.

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!

Like a Puck to the Head: Ice Hockey Memories - and Ice Dancing

Village in the Snow,
by Alan Lees

I've just edited, polished and republished a new edition of a novel called Ice Dancing for Kindle - and there will be a paperback available before too long.

It's a story about Scottish village life. It's a very grown up love story with a heroine who is almost ten years older than the man she loves. (Why is that so unusual?) There's a dark side to it. But it's also a story about the beauty and skill and poetry of a sport that I've loved for a very long time.

There's a Canadian hockey song that talks about love being like a 'frozen puck to the head.' If you've never seen a hockey game, and never felt the size, weight and speed of a frozen ice hockey puck, that won't mean much to you. But once felt, never forgotten. Even when the puck occasionally flies over the protective plexi glass and connects with a spectator, it can be painful, and people are advised to keep their eye on it at all times. So not a bad way of describing the kind of love that comes out of nowhere and strikes like a bolt of lightning.

My own love affair with ice hockey began many years ago when I was a young woman teaching English to adults in Tampere, in Finland. I spent two very happy years there, and one of the first things we learned was that if you wanted to get the young engineers and other techies talking - which was our job, after all - you had only to ask them about ice hockey. We would have long conversations about the rules of the game and the state of play of the local teams. It was hard not to become involved, especially when these 'students' - who were essentially the same age as we were - invited us out to hockey games so that we could see just what they were talking about!

Cue forward some years and the UK saw a renaissance of interest in professional ice hockey, with the setting up of the so-called Superleague, involving several high calibre teams. This was a bit controversial in that these teams employed many ‘imported’, particularly Canadian, players, but it undeniably raised the standards of play for the spectators who had the privilege of watching some world class hockey on home ice. Plus the standard of coaching for young, aspiring British players, my own son included, was excellent and inspirational.

Although there are still teams throughout the UK, playing excellent, entertaining hockey, the Superleague lasted only from 1995 to 2003, after which it was disbanded and replaced with the Elite Hockey League. My own seasons spent as a ‘UK hockey mom’ inspired at least some of the background to the novel, a time I remember with a great deal of affection, not least because of the off-ice chat and laughter. Hockey was and remains a very inclusive sport. 

When I was writing Ice Dancing, though, it was another occasion I remembered. I had taken my son and his friend to a public skating session at our local ice arena, when a young man, casually dressed in jeans and a fleece, started moving gently over the ice in time to the music. Except that it was like no dancing on ice I had ever seen before. I never found out who he was, but I remember thinking that he might have been a hockey player, because most of them have the same grace as ice dancers and there was something about his movements that suggested hockey. Of course I wrote it as fiction.

'In the control box, someone had put on Too Lost In You, and lowered the lights just a little. It was strange. Other people were still skating, but he made them look clumsy. He skated gently and deftly around them and among them, not bothering them at all, making patterns on the ice in time to the music. He skated like a dream. He was showing off now. I knew fine he was showing off for me and everyone else, unable to resist the temptation of that music and those sexy words. After a while, people went to the side, just so they could watch him. The stewards stood with their arms folded, defensive and a bit jealous. Players didn’t usually do this. They normally kept themselves to themselves. But here was Joe, putting on a display for free. It wasn’t done.

And what Joe was doing, it wasn’t exactly dancing, but it was rhythmic and fluid and sometimes it was acrobatic. A man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Now you know why they call him Sky Napier. Good, isn’t he?’ And I nodded but he was more than good. He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice. The music was part of the magic, sensual and insistent. He seemed like nothing but movement. I could have watched him all day. A creature of ice and fire. Bright and enticing.'

Ice Dancing is entirely fictional, but there is a darker side of the sport - of all sports  - that is a part of the fabric of the novel. And on another topic, the wartime internment of Italians who had made their homes in Scotland for many years is a matter of shameful fact. Given the more recent experiences of the Windrush generation, it is one that has by no means been consigned to history.

All the same - this is mainly a book about an unexpected physical and mental attraction, the sheer, overwhelming joy of falling unwisely in love - and the sheer joy of ice hockey too! 

Picture by Skeeze on Pixabay

The Physic Garden on a Kindle Daily Deal - Another Grown Up Love Story.

Today, that's 20th May, the Physic Garden is on Amazon on a Kindle Daily Deal, for one day only, so if you haven't read it and you're fond of historical fiction, you can give it a go for 99p. It was the Sunday Times's pick of historical fiction last spring and their reviewer liked it very much.

The physic garden of the title is the old medicinal herb garden of the mediaeval college of Glasgow University, back when it was in the centre of town, quite close to the cathedral. I never realised, when I named the book, how many people would read that word as psychic. But there's nothing spooky about it, although I'm not averse to writing about the paranormal! Just not in this novel.

When students studied botany back in the very early 1800s, they needed plant specimens and the physic garden was supposed to supply them. But at that time, the garden was suffering from industrial pollution from the nearby type foundry, and was dying. The lecturer in Botany, Dr Thomas Brown, asks William Lang to go out into the surrounding countryside to gather herbs for him and the two men strike up an unlikely friendship. It is on one of these expeditions that William meets weaver's daughter and bee keeper Jenny Caddas, and falls in love with her.

But there's a lot more to it than that. The story is told by William, in old age, looking back on the events of his youth. And we quickly become aware that something bad has happened. What that something is, you'll need to read the novel to find out. This is a book about a terrible betrayal, but also about a city on the cusp of the industrial revolution - a book about medical developments, about the early days of surgery, and how we treat women and their bodies. It's also a story about the painful getting of wisdom.

It's not as racy as some of my novels - Ice Dancing, for instance or Orange Blossom Love - nor as gentle as The Curiosity Cabinet. Nor does it have the big. bold, tragic central story of Bird of Passage (my current favourite!) or The Amber Heart although it's just as heartbreaking. I never seem to be able to write twice in a similar vein although I think the style is all me. But these days, when I'm asked what kind of things I write, I find myself saying 'Grown up love stories' - and that's what this is: literary fiction for sure, the voice a little dry and ironic, because of who is telling it - but essentially a love story. Who loves whom, though - well, that's the interesting part.

There's a Pinterest board too, where you can find out some more about the visual inspiration behind the novel.

Bird of Passage

Cover art by Scottish artist Alison Bell

This is just a small update about Bird of Passage - because I'll be writing some more about the background to the novel next week. I've done some minor revisions - nothing structural or important - just a bit of reformatting and a few edits to punctuation and so on. This was one of my earliest independently published novels and it needed a little care and attention.

At the same time, I've taken the opportunity to publish it to a number of other platforms, so if you don't have a Kindle or Kindle App, you'll find it on Apple, Kobo, Nook etc. I'm planning a paperback edition later on this year, as soon as I've finished the first draft of my Jean Armour novel.

A surprising and gratifying number of readers have taken the time and trouble to tell me how much this novel means to them - and that kind of feedback can't be ignored. I'm very much moved by it and very grateful to them for contacting me or reviewing the novel. It does, I fear, make it all the more surprising that no traditional publisher ever took this one on. A few publishers saw it and turned it down. Successive agents read it, said 'no thanks - you need to come up with something more commercial' and wouldn't even send it out. But I knew that those people who had read it - real readers, not industry insiders - were telling me that it should be published.

Sometimes you can see why a book might be turned down. Even if it's a well written book, you can see that it might not be quite what the market wants. But sometimes, you simply don't understand. And this is one of those books. I self published it with some trepidation - but then various people - strangers as well as friends - told me how much they loved it. So I'm glad that now, other people can read it.

I've also been thinking about the serious and distressing background to this book - the Irish Industrial Schools that were still in existence until the 1970s and that have left a great many damaged individuals behind them, people who are still seeking the redress and closure they so badly need and deserve, but don't seem able to get. I'll be blogging about this a little bit next week. It was distressing to research and heartbreaking to write. It isn't even 'my' story to tell. But I had an Irish grandmother who - for reasons too personal to go into here - could easily have found herself in this kind of situation.

Bird of Passage is a love story - of course it is - and something of a homage to Wuthering Heights, but it's also a story about a damaged individual and how that damage spreads and is inflicted on others. And of course it's set in a landscape that I love very much indeed - a wild Scottish island landscape like this one.

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.