Sophia's Secret

Sophia's Secret Synopsis

When bestselling author Carrie McClelland visits the ruins of Slains Castle in Scotland for research for her new book, she is unprepared for the magnetic pull the local area has on her. Enchanted by the stark and beautiful Scottish landscape, she rents an old stone cottage near the windswept ruins and decides to set her new historical novel at the castle itself.

History has all but forgotten the spring of 1708, when an invasion fleet of French and Scottish soldiers nearly succeeded in landing the exiled James Stewart in Scotland to reclaim his crown. Realising one of her own ancestors, Sophia Paterson, lived around the same time, Carrie creates a fictional life for Sophia and places her at Slains to be a narrator for the events leading up to the Jacobite uprising.

It is a time seething with political unrest and there is no shortage of spies and clandestine meetings at Slains. Soon, the characters in her book come alive with almost frightening intensity and Carrie is shocked when she learns that Sophia was indeed a resident at the castle at the time. When further coincidences confirm her fiction is closer to fact, Carrie realises that this story is not entirely her own.

As Sophia’s memories draw Carrie more deeply into the intrigue of 1708, she comes to realise that a hitherto unrealised bond with her ancestor is providing her with an immediate window into the true events of the time – and the two women have more in common than one might think.

Mesmerising and meticulously researched, Sophia's Secret is a haunting tale of two women’s experiences of love, political intrigue and personal betrayal in two very different times.