Now that I’ve just finished reading all of them, I’m feeling very guilty indeed, because she clearly is the reigning queen of Scottish historical fiction. I made sure that we reviewed her books, but I never read any of them.
Jane Harris, for no good reason, never made that list. In the first 15 years of this century, when I was The Scotsman’s books editor, I probably interviewed, reviewed or at least read most of Scotland’s best writers. Perhaps they had seen the balloons of hype burst too many times, all those hundreds of books that never came close to matching their publishers’ promises. Maybe on the day the press release arrived making stonking claims for a debut novel they subsequently ignored, they were feeling just a little bit jaded. Even if they don’t always admit it, there is always some writer they feel guilty about, whom they ought to have read but never did.
Now having read and enjoyed them all he urges everyone else to do the same.Įvery newspaper books editor makes mistakes. ‘What I love about Harris’s novels is the way that they take the uncertainties we all have about the present and plonk them down again in that other, usually more certain country (because we know what happened) of the past.’ For some reason David Robinson had never read any Jane Harris books until recently.
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