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Especially for Christmas, you will find a short extract of a work in progress free to read on the Novel page of this site.

The Dowager’s Dream, the latest novel published by Miriam Hastings, is a surreal fantasy set on the north coast of Scotland at the time of the brutal clearances in the Scottish Highlands.  The novel was inspired by the (largely imagined) lives of Miriam’s great great-grandmothers, Margaret MacKenzie and Christine Patterson, and also by an account written in 1809 by a minister’s daughter, describing a mermaid she had seen in Sandside Bay, Caithness. Although The Dowager’s Dream is set in the early years of the 19th Century, the themes of dispossession and ethnic cleansing will resonate with the contemporary reader.

Read this imaginative interview by writer and blogger Chantelle Atkins with Kirsty MacDonald, one of the central characters from The Dowager’s Dream: interview on Glorious Outsiders

Also another great interview about the inspiration behind the novel on the blog of writer and blogger Kate Rigby: bubbitybooks.blogspot.com/2023/