News

A LIFETIME BURNING now on Kindle
Linda's second novel was re-published as a Kindle e-book in January 2012.


More foreign editions
Translation rights to HOUSE OF SILENCE and EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY have been sold to Turkey where STAR GAZING has already been a big success.


HOUSE OF SILENCE has been selected by Amazon UK as one of its Top Ten BEST OF 2011 in the Indie Author category. It's also been chosen as one of their Books of the Year by book bloggers CORNFLOWER BOOKS and RANDOM JOTTINGS OF A BOOK & OPERA LOVER.


Work in progress... Scroll down for the opening of Linda's sixth novel, IF THE SUN AND MOON SHOULD DOUBT, a contemporary supernatural love story set on the Isle of Skye.


A new novel on Kindle
Linda's fifth novel, UNTYING THE KNOT was published in August 2011 as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.


As Durham University's CELEBRATE SCIENCE Author in Residence Linda blogged throughout 2011 at CELEBRATING SCIENCE


Linda was invited to become the CELEBRATE SCIENCE Author in Residence for 2011 at Durham University "with the aim of encouraging greater creative dialogue between scientists and fiction writers."


STAR GAZING now a Kindle e-book
STAR GAZING was published as an e-book by Piatkus in June 2011, priced £4.99.


New novel HOUSE OF SILENCE
Linda's fourth novel HOUSE OF SILENCE, a romantic family drama, is on sale on Amazon as a Kindle e-book. It has sold 15,000 copies since it was published in April 2011 and has become a Kindle best-seller.


SCOTTISH FIELD feature
Linda contributed to a feature on "Haunted Scotland" in the January 2011 issue of SCOTTISH FIELD magazine.


STAR GAZING NOMINATED FOR SPANISH BOOK AWARD
STAR GAZING was shortlisted for a Premios Dama 2010 romantic book award.


SEVENTH FOREIGN EDITION OF STAR GAZING
STAR GAZING was published in Turkey in February 2011.


Linda's third novel STAR GAZING topped WOMAN'S WEEKLY's reader poll for Favourite Romantic Novel 1960-2010. Katie Fforde presented Linda with a trophy at a champagne breakfast organised by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

 

SIXTH FOREIGN EDITION OF STAR GAZING
Wydawnictwo Ksiaznica will publish a Polish edition of STAR GAZING in 2012.


Join Linda on FACEBOOK!
Linda now has a Fan page on Facebook where book (and other) news is posted.


EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY to have its first foreign edition.
Following the success of STAR GAZING in Portugal, the publisher Publicacoes Europa-America brought out a Portuguese edition of Linda's first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY (Os Laços que nos Unem) in May 2010.


STAR GAZING NOW AVAILABLE ON AUDIO
You can now listen to STAR GAZING unabridged on audio cassettes, CDs or MP3, all available from Ulverscroft. The book is read by Scots actress Cathleen McCarron.


STAR GAZING SHORT-LISTED AGAIN!
STAR GAZING was short-listed for the UK's first environmental book award, the Robin Jenkins Literary Award, promoting writing inspired by Scotland's landscape. Shortlisted authors were invited to an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival and Linda blogged about it on the book blog Rhapsodyinbooks


TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE
STAR GAZING was published in a Russian edition by Atticus Publishing. This is the fifth foreign language edition.


LINDA GUEST BLOGS
Linda has written guest blogs for the writers' blog Author! Author! and the book blog Rhapsodyinbooks.


STAR GAZING FILM RIGHTS SOLD
STAR GAZING has been optioned for cinema by Capricorn Film Productions Ltd in Glasgow.


STAR GAZING SHORTLISTED FOR BOOK AWARD
Linda's third novel, STAR GAZING was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2009, presented by the Romantic Novelists' Association. For more details about the award see the RNA's website.


SMOOTH RADIO
Linda was interviewed on Smooth Radio's Bookcase programme. She was discussing STAR GAZING with Alex Dickson.


STAR GAZING, Linda's third novel was published by Piatkus in May 2008.


RUNNER-UP IN PURE PASSION PROMOTION
EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY tied as runner-up in NW Libraries' PURE PASSION promotion. Readers were asked to vote for their favourite romantic read from a shortlist selected to reflect the diversity of romantic writing published in the last ten years. Many thanks to anyone who voted/canvassed for EG!


Linda was invited to appear at the first national Mental Health Arts Film and Media Festival held in Glasgow in October 2007. She appeared at Glasgow Women's Library talking about EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. The festival explored mental health and people’s experiences of stigma and discrimination.


A LIFETIME BURNING was featured in PRIMA magazine in an article about book groups' favourite reads.


THE BOOKCROSSING UNCONVENTION
Linda appeared at The 2008 BookCrossing Unconvention in Brighton, giving a talk about her books and also teaching a writing workshop.


EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was voted into the Top Ten Reads of 2006 by BCUK, the UK chapter of www.BookCrossing.com. EG tied in 4th place.




 

The next novel... IF THE SUN AND MOON SHOULD DOUBT 

Linda's sixth novel will be a contemporary supernatural love
story set on the Isle of Skye.


He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.

WILLIAM BLAKE



PROLOGUE


When I was a child I nearly drowned. In a pond. Nothing dramatic, apart from the fact that I nearly died. I fell into a big pool at my Aunt Janet’s house on the Isle of Skye.

I fell from a wooden bridge over the pool. At least, I think I fell. I don’t remember falling, all I remember is drowning – almost drowning – and then I remember being very cold and so sick, I thought I must have vomited up my insides.

I was rescued – well, obviously – but I don’t remember being hauled out of the water. Such memories as I have of the event are just what my aunt told me afterwards, about how I lay gasping and retching on the grass, black with mud and slime, covered in pondweed, like some sinister water sprite.

I do remember one thing though. I remember Aunt Janet shouting at my little playmate, the child who’d rescued me from the pond. She shrieked at him, over and over, ‘Who was it? Did you see him?’ I think she wanted to know who’d pulled me out. I remember her screaming (was it in anger or terror?) at the boy who’d apparently saved my life, ‘You can’t have! You’re not even wet!Who was it?’

After she’d given me a good scolding and forbidden me to play on the bridge ever again, Aunt Janet never mentioned my near-drowning. It was put away as something too terrible to talk about.

But I used to dream about it. I still do.

It’s a black, choking dream in which I feel so cold, it seems more likely I’ll freeze to death than drown. Then something moves through the water, something very pale. And strong. It pulls me, drags me upwards, toward the light. The strange thing is, in the dream, I don’t want to go. I want to stay down in the darkness. I want to die, or rather, I don’t mind dying.

But despite myself, I rise upwards, then just as I’m about to break through, into the light, I wake up. I wake up soaked with sweat, drenched and cold, almost as if I’ve actually been in the water.

It’s a horrible dream. So real.

I didn’t drown, but every time I have this dream, I feel as if I did, but that I was given a reprieve. Another chance. Another go at life.

I didn’t have that dream last night. What happened last night was worse. Far worse. But you won’t understand unless I start at the beginning. (And even then, you still might not understand.) In the end I decided it wasn’t so much a case of understanding, but rather believing. Believing it was possible.

Because not believing just wasn’t an option.




CHAPTER ONE


I wasn’t sorry to leave London. It was high time. People have short memories when it comes to TV programmes, but occasionally someone would accost me in a supermarket aisle.

‘Excuse me, but didn’t you use to be Ruth Travers?’

I would stand tall, pull my tummy in and say, ‘Actually, I still am.’

Undeterred, my tormentor (usually female) would peer at my face, as if I were an unusual specimen in a zoo. ‘You looked younger on TV…’ she would say, accusingly. ‘Well, fancy seeing you in here! “Delia of the Delphiniums”!’

‘You know, in five years I only made one programme about delphiniums.’

‘Suppose you’ll turn up on Hallmark eventually. There’s so many channels now, they don’t know how to fill up the schedules, do they?’

‘Really, I have no idea. I don’t even watch TV these days, let alone appear on it.’ Glancing ostentatiously at my watch, I would form a startled O with my lips and exclaim, ‘Is that the time? You must excuse me. I’m going to be late for a meeting with Prince Charles. He wants to pick my brains about growing comfrey as green manure. Sorry! Must fly!’

Ignoring a belated request for an autograph, I’d make my escape, diving into the nearest tube station, anxious to resume the life of anonymity and quiet desperation I’d known since losing my lover, my father and the woman I’d regarded as a mother.

~~~

I called it The Year of Deaths. My annus horribilis.

It began with David dropping dead on New Year’s Day as he shovelled snow. He was fifty-four. I wish I could say he died a happy man, but two hours earlier, I’d finally summoned up the courage to tell him I thought our relationship was going nowhere. Unable to process the information, he’d gone out to clear the drive as a displacement activity and suffered a fatal heart attack.

I was given leave of absence from my TV gardening show and was gearing up for a return in the spring when my irascible and difficult father was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. He was a widower and I was his only child, so I turned my back on a lucrative television career and the horticultural work I loved, in order to spend more time with my father and eventually to nurse him.

I took his ashes to the Isle of Skye. Dad had spent little time there himself, but I knew it well. I was only eight when my mother died, but my father virtually gave up on the real world and retreated into academia, his first love and his great consolation. He sent me to Skye every year to spend the summer with his sister-in-law, Janet, while he stayed behind in Cambridge to research and write.

Aunt Janet did her best to fill the breach and became mother, father and friend to me. It was she who taught me to grow things and to love the natural world, so after I’d scattered my father’s ashes, I decided to stay with Janet for a while, hoping to recover from the combined shock of the loss of my partner and my father’s sad and sudden decline.

But there was to be no let-up for me. Janet had one of her dizzy spells in the garden and fell down a small flight of stone steps. She broke her arm and collarbone and never recovered. She was eighty-two and, confined to bed, her mental and physical decline was rapid. Her GP advised me to prepare for the worst.

I’d borne up pretty well losing David and then my father, but when Janet died I went to pieces. Smithereens. I was inconsolable and thought I would go mad with grief. (Perhaps I did. That would account for what happened later. Or seemed to happen.) Janet’s kindly GP looked after me and said my reaction wasn’t just about losing my aunt. It was pent-up grief that had accumulated during that terrible year.

I couldn’t face a return to London and my stalled career, let alone the prospect of dating at the age of forty-two. Nor could I face clearing out Tigh-na-Linne, Janet’s beloved home, which now belonged to me. So for a while I shuttled back and forth from Skye to London, collecting my things, tidying up loose ends, shutting up my flat, finally returning to Tigh-na-Linne, where I spent my time in a sort of daze, grieving, resting and tending Janet’s beautiful garden.

Then something unaccountable happened.

~~~

One day, when Janet had been dead for about a month, I went into the study, determined to make a start on sorting out her personal things. I should perhaps point out that, unlike me, Aunt Janet was obsessively tidy. Since her death I’d tried to propitiate her spirit by keeping the house in good order, with everything in its place, just as she would have wished. I think I must have been scared of letting her go, of forgetting her, and this was my way of keeping her with me for a little while longer.

As I sank into the battered leather chair behind Janet’s desk, I noticed that the top was off her gold fountain pen. Pen and pen-top lay on the blotter, leaking fresh ink. Beside the pen, Janet’s RHS gardening diary (my Christmas present to her every year) lay open. Glancing at the blank page, I registered with a pang that the diary was open at the week of her death. Puzzled and not a little unnerved, I scanned the rest of the desk. My eye came to rest on the brass perpetual calendar which Janet hadn’t been able to alter since the day of her fall. It said Thursday, October 21st.

Today’s date.

As I said, Janet had been dead for a month. She employed no cleaner or any other domestic staff. There had been a gardener who put in a few hours a week, but once it was clear I was staying, Janet gave him notice, insisting (for my own good, I think) that I took responsibility for the garden. As far as I knew, no one had keys to the house apart from me. Janet’s nearest neighbours were currently in Australia. Dr Mackenzie had looked in on me two weeks ago, but I’d had no visitor since, unless you counted the postman. No one and nothing had disturbed my hermit’s existence. I was quite alone.

At least, I thought I was.

~~~

I put it down to strain. I’d been in a bad way after Janet died and Dr Mackenzie had had to prescribe a tranquilliser to get me through the funeral, so I concluded I must have had some sort of delayed reaction to the drug, some drastic memory lapse that prevented me from remembering that I’d wandered into Janet’s study and messed about with her things.

Or perhaps I’d taken to sleepwalking. Wasn’t that supposed to be a reaction to stress? I’d never done such a thing in the two years I’d been sleeping with David, but with all my loved ones wiped out in less than a year, who knew what sort of reaction might set in? And if it was a reaction to grief, I might well have touched my aunt’s precious things, arranged her desk to look as if she’d just popped out of the room. (Except that Aunt Janet would no more have left the top off her pen than she’d leave the house in her underwear.)

I tidied these troubling thoughts away, along with Janet’s pen and diary, which I put into the desk drawer, shutting it firmly. My enthusiasm for making a start on her papers had evaporated, leaving me feeling unsettled. I decided that, instead, I would go to the music room and sort out her sheet music.

In her youth, Janet Gillespie had been a fine pianist. She’d hoped for a performing career, but she’d never fulfilled her early promise and, in such a competitive field, it was easy for a woman (rather a plain woman, it has to be said) to be overlooked. Janet eventually abandoned her performing career and channelled her energies into teaching and composing. After an inauspicious start – a chamber opera that flopped and a set of piano pieces that critics condemned as “trite” - Janet seemed to find her voice in the 1950s and began to enjoy some success, most notably with a romantic song cycle, In Memoriam, a poignant and pacifist response to the First World War, in which several of her forebears had died.

In Memoriam made Janet’s name and she never looked back. Success seemed to unleash her creativity and her new compositions met with acclaim. Since her death I’d received emails from academics asking if I wished to sell or even donate Janet’s musical archive. One persistent but polite musicologist from Toronto University had asked if he could visit Tigh-na-Linne to make a study of her manuscripts as he was writing a book about female composers. Since Janet would have loathed the idea of being relegated to such a ghetto, I’d said no.

So far I’d ignored all other requests, but I knew I’d have to deal with them eventually. Janet’s musical legacy was important. It was probably also valuable. So I decided I’d spend a pleasant morning in the music room, her favourite room in the house and the one with the best view.

On Janet’s death I’d become the owner of Tigh-na-Linne, (Gaelic for “the house by the pool”), a large Victorian country house on the Isle of Skye in the region of Sleat (pronounced “Slate”.) Sleat was known as “the garden of Skye” on account of the lushness of its vegetation. It was appropriate that Janet should live there since she divided her time and energies between her two great loves: music and gardening. Hers was a seasonal existence. She composed in winter and gardened from spring (very late on Skye) until the end of autumn.

Tigh-na-Linne was draughty, leaky and, as the estate agents say, in need of refurbishment. (To judge from some of the wallpapers and carpets, I don’t think Janet had decorated since the 1980s.) Because it was largely unmodernised, the house retained a lot of period features: marble fireplaces, wooden shutters and sanitary ware of surprising loveliness. When I used to come and stay as a child, I felt as if I’d wandered in to the pages of one of the classics: The Railway Children or The Water Babies. There was even a big mirror over the mantelpiece, like the one in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Standing on a chair, I’d attempted to penetrate it by pressing my hands against the glass, but I’d found it unyielding. (So was Aunt Janet when she saw the grubby fingerprints I’d left on the mirror.)

Modernised and refurbished, Tigh-na-Linn would be worth a tidy amount. What was impossible to value was the house’s location. Rattling windows, water-stained ceilings and idiosyncratic plumbing paled into insignificance when one looked out of the big windows at the view over Loch Eishort, a sea loch, to the Black Cuillin mountains beyond and the distant islands of Canna and Rhum.

Janet had spent most of her life at Tigh-na-Linne. She’d been born there and so had her mother, Grace, only surviving child of James and Agnes Munro, who lost their three sons in the so-called Great War. Not long before she died, I asked Janet if she’d ever grown tired of her incomparable view, or if she’d just become inured to it after eighty years. Without pausing to think, she announced, in that abrupt way she had that sounded impatient but really masked an essential shyness, ‘Och, you never get used to beauty, Ruth. Never! All that happens is you become increasingly intolerant of ugliness and wonder why on earth folk put up with it.’

Now with Janet gone, all that beauty was mine to enjoy.

Alone.

~~~

Having discovered Janet’s desk in disarray, I was just a little nervous as I entered the music room and made my way toward the cabinet where she stored all her music. I hadn’t entered the room since her death. Before that I’d only come in once a week, at Janet’s request, to dust. She couldn’t bear for the Bechstein grand piano to stand unused, but as I couldn’t play and she had a broken arm, it had to remain untouched, but not entirely neglected. I dusted it carefully and always left it as Janet would wish to find it: open and ready to play.

I didn’t notice the piano until I turned round, my arms full of sheet music and sheaves of manuscript paper. As soon as I saw it, I cried out and dropped all the music. As it fell to the floor, loose sheets fluttered upwards, then sank again with a sigh. I stood and stared, open-mouthed.

The piano was closed. The lid was down and the keyboard was shut away. Not only was there no music open on the elaborately carved music stand, the stand itself had been folded away inside the piano. Never had I seen Aunt Janet’s piano in this sorry state. It was a point of honour that her beloved Bechstein – her partner in life, almost – should always stand ready to play. To close it up would have been a kind of sacrilege.

But closed it was.

Stepping over the piles of music on the floor, I headed for the sitting room where I poured myself a brandy, my mind reeling. Someone was playing games with me. But who? Dear old Dr Mackenzie? Surely not! Could it be the gardener Janet had laid off, unemployed and nursing a grudge? It surely couldn’t be a random intruder, shutting up a grand piano and leaving the top off a fountain pen. It had to be someone with malicious intent who knew both Janet and me very well. But who knew both of us? Only Dr Mackenzie. And why would he do such a thing?

The brandy wasn’t helping, but I needed a distraction and I liked the feel of the heavy bottle in my hands, like an improvised weapon. I took a deep, calming breath and considered. Gardener-with-a-grudge had to be Suspect No. 1. Perhaps Janet had once lent him a key, or he’d seen one hanging up somewhere. Perhaps he knew of a secret way in to the house. I decided I would check every door and window in the house, after which I would speak to the man whose name and number were recorded on the kitchen notice board.

Despite the mildness of the October day, I was shivering as I drained my glass.

~~~