The author of three hard-hitting financial thrillers takes a fresh direction in this heart-warming story of love, across a seemingly impossible divide. Set in a 1940's mining village, full of interesting characters, where the passion for racing pigeons unites all the men and is an unbreakable bond for widower Dan Pugh and his brain damaged daughter Bethan. Full of humour and humanity, this tale, confronts the reader with one of the most elemental mysteries of the planet and offers a most original solution.
The story is set in a mining village in the 1940s, when all the men kept racing pigeons.
Dan Pugh, a miner whose wife died in childbirth, loves the little daughter who survived. Bethan is brain damaged and cannot do many things, but adores her father and the racing pigeons. When she is fifteen Dan gives Bethan her own very special bird named Birthday, which turns out to be an extraordinary racing champion.
The villagers supply a rich supporting cast in this story - from Dan’s spinster sister who keeps house (and whose heart is being broken by a secret love affair with a local shepherd) to a kindly doctor, ice-cream makers, a classical school master, Italian immigrants, a wayward teenage girl, and more. When war comes and Dan is reported missing in action, they all try, without success, to explain to Bethan what has happened. But for her, with her unique slant on human life, death simply has no meaning. In the end Bethan’s solution is to send Birthday to her father with a letter. But can any pigeon, however fast, take a message to a dead man?
L M Shakespeare was born in Wales, educated at schools in England, followed by Cambridge University. She is the author of three financial thrillers: Lodestar (Utmost Good Faith), The Gentlemen’s Mafia, and Death Valley (Poisoning the Angels), first published by Macdonald & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, in paperback by Futura, and reissued in paperback and Kindle by Hopcyn Press. Her historical novel, Malice, is recently out in paperback and Kindle.