In another life (and, like every writer, I have many other lives) I’m a travel writer. I use words to describe
the places I’ve been and the
experiences I’ve had, and to try
and pin down the essence of a place. And they’re different, not just in terms of language
or culture. The rough volcanic rocks of the English Lakes have a totally
different feel to the soft fields of southern Scotland, not too many miles
away.
I’m telling you this
because places are important to me. Almost without exception, the starting
point for my novels is the location. Then come the characters and then,
bringing up the rear, the plot. That’s why my books tend to be set in places that aren’t just scenic but are interesting as well (and
are usually somewhere I’ve been on holiday because that’s when I have time to think).
Looking For Charlotte is different. The idea came from a newspaper cutting
which gave me both plot and characters,
though obviously I tinkered with them. But it didn’t give me the location. The real life
location, Pennsylvania, is somewhere I’ve never been and about which I know nothing so it
clearly wouldn’t do. So I took my
characters, Flora and Suzanne, and I moved them across the Atlantic to
Scotland.
Perhaps I should tell you what it’s all about. Hearing that the police have
abandoned the search for a toddler, Flora Wilson embarks on a search for the
child’s body so as to
bring closure to Charlotte’s mother, Suzanne — a quest which takes her through large and empty tracts of the Scottish
Highlands.
Why Scotland? It’s where I live. The Highlands, the focus for most of the novel, is
somewhere I spend a lot of time (though admittedly never enough). And the
Scottish landscape fits the tone of the book to perfection.
In a search for a buried child, the land is the key. First, following
the clues left in the killer’s suicide notes, Flora must identify the area where the body might be
buried — she must read the
landscape. It changes with the seasons; she must read that too. The book is set
in winter where the mountains and moorlands are bleak, sometimes even hostile
and Flora’s misreading of
nature leads her into peril.
Looking For Charlotte isn’t a travel book, but the story is closely integrated with the land in
which Flora lives — a land of
brooding beauty and fierce contrasts, and a land I love.
Excerpt
They fell into silence as they thought about the past.
Perhaps they’d
rambled the same hills at the same time with their previous partners. Maybe she
and Danny had straggled separately along rocky paths while Philip and Jo walked
hand-in-hand a few hundred yards away. Perhaps. Perhaps. She looked sideways
and saw that Philip had a pensive look on his face, as if he were thinking the
same thing. But she didn’t ask. Philip made her feel young and happy, but the
shadow of Jo scared her in some mad, inexplicable way, haunting the day out
like a ghost of the Scottish hills. Always, surely, at the front of Philip’s mind, at the very
kernel of his being.
They sat for a while longer in silence against the
sun-warmed rock, looking to the south. Here, a window of perfect autumn weather
had surprised them. To the south there was more of a haze, where a low glaze of
cloud lay over the Great Glen and the hills around it. In the distance, if
Flora looked hard, she could see faint scars on the landscape a short distance
from the road, close to a glass-roofed extension to a crumbling house and a
rusty old farm vehicle. If she hadn’t known what it was she’d never have guessed. The police had gone
now, though they hadn’t
quite been able to bring themselves to abandon their search site completely.
When she and Philip had driven past on the way up, they’d seen the blue and white tape and the Keep Out signs. From a distance it just looked like another
swathe of peat cutting, though one where there was no peat to cut.
Sitting beside her, Philip, who’d suggested this walk, glanced at his
watch. His sigh was one of reluctance; she knew that, like her, he loved to
walk but spent little enough time on the hills once work, football, and
domestic chores were taken care of. She worried that he took a puritanical view
of self-indulgence, felt guilty about enjoying himself too much or too often.
She wanted to make him smile.
‘That’s three o’clock,’
he said reluctantly.
She glanced at her own watch for confirmation. ‘Should we head back?’
There was a tempting summit a
little further on, but she’d spent enough time in the hills to know how false the
promise of even the smallest detour could be.
‘I suppose so.’
Standing up, they dropped down below the ridge to
where the elements once again became bearable. Out of the wind it was warm
again. Flora unzipped her jacket and looked towards Loch Broom and the
glittering jet and silver jigsaw which the light had made of the Summer Isles
and the sea. The fretted outline of the coast always made her stop and think,
and today it reminded her of something. ‘What was it Joanne said?’
Once again Philip’s mind was following her own; he answered
without the slightest puzzlement. ‘When the tide goes out we’re all part of the same landscape.’
‘It’s a very nice idea. That we’re all interconnected.’
‘Apparently it’s a very strong Celtic concept. I must read
up on the Celts.’
They were silent as they
scrambled down the steepest part of the path. A quick glimpse to the south
showed the fold of cloud had drifted a little closer. ‘You must miss her,’
she observed with daring, as
they reached a flatter part and began making more rapid progress, side by side
on the widening path.
Blurb
Divorced and lonely, Flora Wilson is distraught when she hears news of
the death of little Charlotte Anderson. Charlotte’s father killed her and then himself, and
although he left a letter with clues to her grave, his two-year-old daughter
still hasn’t been found.
Convinced that she failed her own children, now grown up and seldom at home,
Flora embarks on a quest to find Charlotte’s body to give the child’s mother closure, believing that by doing
so she can somehow atone for her own failings.
As she hunts in winter through the remote moors of the Scottish
Highlands, her obsession comes to challenge the very fabric of her life — her job, her friendship with her colleague
Philip Metcalfe, and her relationships with her three children.
Tirgearr Publishing: http://tirgearrpublishing.com/authors/Young_Jennifer/looking-for-charlotte.htm
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/1D7pNY6
Amazon US: http://amzn.to/1JmAwBR
Author bio
I live in Edinburgh and I write romance and contemporary women’s fiction. I’ve been writing all my life and my first
book was published in February 2014, though I’ve had short stories published before then.
The thing that runs through all my writing is an interest in the world around
me. I love travel and geography and the locations of my stories is always
important to me. And of course I love reading — anything and everything.
Links
Twitter: @JYnovelist
Website: http://www.jenniferyoungauthor.com/
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