The Life And Death Of St Kilda

The extraordinary story of the UK's most gruelling and spectacularly beautiful islands. Tom Steel's acclaimed portrait of the St Kildan's lives is now updated in this reissued edition.

The extraordinary story of the UK’s most gruelling and spectacularly beautiful islands. Tom Steel’s acclaimed portrait of the St Kildan’s lives is now updated in this reissued edition.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE RNA HISTORICAL ROMANCE AWARD 2021* *LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2020* 'Desperately romantic, lyrically written and with a fascinating plot' Katie Fforde Chrissie Gillies comes from the last ever community to live on the beautiful, isolated Scottish island of St Kilda. Evacuated in 1930, she will never forget her life there, nor the man she loved and lost who visited one fateful summer a few years before. Fred Lawson has been captured, beaten and imprisoned in Nazi-controlled France. Making a desperate escape across occupied territory, one thought sustains him: find Chrissie, the woman he should never have left behind on that desolate, glorious isle. The Lost Lights of St Kilda is a sweeping love story that crosses oceans and decades, and a testament to the extraordinary power of hope in the darkest of times. 'A gorgeous, melancholy love story.' The Times 'An undeniably haunting love story.' Sunday Times

A novel based on the shocking true eighteenth-century story of a Scottish noblewoman whose own husband faked her death and exiled her to a remote island, where she could never be found. Edinburgh, January 1732. It’s the funeral of Rachel, wife of high-ranking aristocrat Lord Grange, whose unexpected death has shocked the mourners. But Rachel is, in fact, very much alive. She has been brutally kidnapped and her death has been faked—by her own husband. Whether punishment for being “too feisty for a lady” and not submissive enough for a wife, or to cover up his treasonous Jacobite leanings, or simply to replace her with his long-time mistress, he has banished Rachel to a remote and barren island. There she will be subjected to a life of hardship and loneliness, unable to speak the islanders’ language, far from her beloved children and without hope of being found. Lady Grange has until now been remembered only by her husband’s unflattering account, but this novel reveals events from the perspective of the real Lady Grange. At last, centuries later, her story is reclaimed.

In the 18th century shotgun weddings were not unusual, but in most cases it wasn't the bride that was holding the gun. So began the stormy marriage between Lord and Lady Grange, a marriage which was to end with Lady Grange's death on the Isle of Skye after 13 years in exile. The daughter of a convicted murderer, Lady Grange's behaviour, such as her fondness for drink, was so outrageous that her sudden disappearance from public life was not considered surprising. But few knew the true story of her disappearance. This book reveals, for the first time, how the unfortunate lady was violently kidnapped and transported to the remote islands off the west coast of Scotland, spending seven years on the island of St. Kilda. Condemned to a very different lifestyle than she had enjoyed in Edinburgh, and baffled by the strange tongue of the Gaelic West, she still obstinately survived, finally dying in Skye in 1745.