Weekend Read - Garlands & Shadows by Karen MacLeod

I've known Karen MacLeod for many years now and have always been impressed by her writing. She usually writes historical fiction so this contemporary romance is a departure in genre though not so much in style which, as ever, is lucid and compact. Here she tells us how Garlands and Shadows came into being:

Garlands and Shadows evolved from my earliest attempt at a novel, Castle In A Paperweight, not in terms of story (it was not a straight romance) but in terms of location and several of the characters. It did not have a happy ending – I was young, and didn’t really understand that people need to escape from the world, not find more gloom in it.

It got lots of favourable comments  – I particularly appreciated Allan Massie recommending it to Canongate and Carol Manderson at Century Hutchinson who took the trouble to write “A powerful novel – good luck” on the official typed rejection card  - but no takers. So it turned into a sequel called The Beaufort Weekend, which had a bittersweet ending (slight improvement on gloom) but which I ended up destroying (unlike Paperweight, which, being my first baby, I could not quite bear to destroy).

A long time later, I started Garlands and Shadows with two completely new principal characters, Maura and Jaime, and a happy ending. It is not a sequel to the first two versions, since its past is not their present. But I loved the Highlands, working in several hotels up there as a student, and I think I wanted to write about some of the characters again, since they never quite left me, and give them happiness this time.     

Karen MacLeod
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Callanish

Karen MacLeod works in an office in Edinburgh, not far from the Castle and Gardens. In her own time she writes – compulsively. A Glasgow University history graduate, she has concentrated mostly on historical fiction; an early novel of the Tudor period has now blossomed into a trilogy. This new novel, Garlands and Shadows, a romance set in the Scottish Highlands, is both a departure and a return to her earliest writing.

Karen’s MacLeod ancestors lived on the west coast of Lewis – the westernmost edge of Europe, three miles from the Bronze Age standing stones of Callanish. One of her great-grandfathers worked on Lord Lovat’s estate at Beauly, Invernessshire. A great grandmother left Ireland as a child for Glasgow during the potato famine and the family of her MacIntosh great-grandmother was displaced from Strathnaver in Sutherland during the Clearances. There’s a lot of  material there – which may yet be mined.

Ian MacLeod
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Garlands and Shadows is available for Kindle at Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com;  Amazon.de; and in all ereader formats at Smashwords.com

It will soon also be available at Barnes & Noble, Kobo and the Apple Bookstore.