Friday Favourites: The Bride of Lammermoor

Misha Herwin on Walter Scott.

Misha Herwin

Sorting through my bookshelves in an attempt to find some room for the piles of books on my office floor, I came across a small, hardback copy of “The Bride of Lammermoor.” In all the years, and they are many, that I have owned this book, it has never been read, so it seemed a good choice for the charity shop. On the other hand, it felt wrong to discard a book, I’d never tried, let alone a writer whose works I’d never sampled.

“The Bride of Lammermoor” is very much a Gothic novel, with a ruined castle, Wolf’s Crag, a terrifying storm, a dashing hero and beautiful heroine. Their love is doomed, the marriage between their rival families cursed and everything ends badly.

The novel is over-written, the Scots dialect both annoying and incomprehensible and yet…There are moments of unexpected insight in the depiction of the relationship between Ravenswood…

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Anuk Naumann:Guest Blogs for Misha Herwin

The artist Anuk Naumann talks to the writer Misha Herwin on her work.

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“Tell us something about yourself. I am an artist living and working in the Cotswolds. I split my time between working for exhibitions and working in my large garden.I love cooking, so try to process the fruit and vegetables which we grow organically…”

read the rest of the Q&A here: Anuk Naumann:Guest Blog

Food for Thought: Tea at The Grand – Misha Herwin

Misha Herwin on inspirations and celebrations.

Misha Herwin

On Saturday, I joined my mum, my daughter, my sister, niece and sister-in-law for afternoon tea at the Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol. We were there to celebrate two big family birthdays, but one of the reasons I chose that hotel from all the others in Bristol is that the Avon Gorge is the model for The Grand in “Picking up the Pieces.”

Being brought up in Bristol and going to school just down the road, this hotel had always intrigued me. Clinging to the side of the Gorge it looks out on the Suspension Bridge and the river far below. I imagined it as a romantic place and conjured up an Art Deco Interior with a large Victorian conservatory, where my characters would meet and Elsa would break the devastating news that sets off the action of the novel.

In real life, however, it was very different. There was…

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Winter Downs Blog Tour day 3a : with Misha Herwin

Winter Downs blog tour day 3a : with Misha Herwin

Misha Herwin

Winter Downs: New Crime Novel by Jan Edwards

On a snowy winter morning Bunch Courtney rides out into the local woods and finds a dead body. Everything points to suicide, but the dead man is Johnny Frampton, a close friend ,and knowing what she does about him, Bunch is convinced that what she is looking at is a murder scene.

This is the opening premise of Winter Downs, a tightly plotted novel set in war time Britain. The 1940 are vividly brought to life and the main character, Bunch, is set to be one of my all time favourite heroines.

I love a strong woman protagonist, but have to admit to a horror of those feisty females in historical novels who transgress every social convention and behave like no woman of their era would have done. Bunch, however, is nothing like them. She is a product of her time and…

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Friends

Misha’s thoughts on friendship

Misha Herwin

Friends

I met my oldest friend when we were seven years old. I don’t know what it was that drew us together, but right from the start we had much in common. We certainly shared a vivid imagination. Break times were spent in our imaginary worlds, whether out in the Wild West, where we were breaking horses and riding bareback over the prairies, or in Regency England where we were the bad girls of the family always getting into trouble over some breach of decorum or other.
As we got older, we slept over at each other’s houses and on one memorable occasion spent New Year’s Eve at The Glen, a nightclub set in an old quarry. Quite why she ended up with such a bad hangover, I don’t remember. I do remember the following morning watching her eating scrambled eggs on toast, slathered in tomato ketchup. Every bite and…

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Looking on the Bright Side.

Misha thinking positively

Misha Herwin

A bookshop in Bristol, the name of which I will not mention, has returned “House of Shadows”. Much sadness and gnashing of teeth occurred followed by a slide into misery and despair.

Not an unusual state for a writer, but for once I eschewed the TLC and made myself have a good long think about the why this sort of situation provokes such an extreme reaction.

In every other form of business no one expects to succeed every time , or indeed to sell every item on offer, why then did the non-sale of a book  make me feel so bad?

Theobvious answer was that books are somehow part of you and rejecting your creation is being rejected yourself and it hurts. Of course that isn’t true; it’s the book itself that isn’t wanted; the shop might not have had space on its shelves; its subject might not have appealed to…

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A Once and Future Bookshop.

Indie Book Shops – reposted  from Misha Herwin’s blog

Traveller in Time

I love bookshops. I love the smell and the feel of them. At least I did until they all got to be great, big, huge chains, with no hidden corners or secret spaces where you could come upon mysterious books by writers you had never heard of.

In my childhood, George’s at the top of Park Street in Bristol, ranged over at least three, if not four stories. There were floors for fiction, religion, philosophy, mathematics and science and a whole basement given over to children’s books. You could spend a whole day there just browsing, discovering new authors, or getting lost in a book.

George’s however is long gone and scrolling through a list of independent bookshops in Bristol the only one I could find was the Durdam Down Bookshop. Family run for the past twenty years, unlike the others listed, it still sells new books. Not only that it plays…

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