Shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year 2009.
A clever, well-researched and charming dual time romance with a clever twist. Set in Scotland in the early 1700's and modern day we follow Carrie, an author, writing about the failed invasion of the exiled Scottish King James who is inexplicably taken over by the characters she is writing about. Is she more involved with her story than she realised? What is the bond that she has uncovered?
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.
Canadian novelist Susanna Kearsley is a former museum curator and she brings her own passion for research and travel to bear in her books, weaving history with modern-day intrigue in a way that, in the words of one reviewer, ‘tells the story of the past and illuminates the present’. She has conned her way into Oxford’s Bodleian Library to read 17th century documents, climbed down a Merovingian holy well in France, roamed the Scottish borders and northern Italy and spent a winter in a 16th century Welsh farmhouse all for the sake of research. Her previous novels include The Shadowy Horses, The Splendour Falls, and the Mariana which won the prestigious Catherine Cookson Literary Prize. She has also started writing thrillers under the alias Emma Cole, the first of which is Every Secret Thing. She lives in Ontario, Canada.
