The Lost Lights of St. Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford - #TuesdayTeaser

Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Teaser. The place where we take a sneaky peek at a book that has caught my eye.

This week we are looking at The Lost Lights of St. Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford.

Elisabeth is the author of several novels, beginning with her debut Secrets of the Sea House, which was shortlisted for the Historical Writers' Association's Debut Crown for Best First Historical Novel in 2014. Having grown up in a vicarage in the Midlands, she went on to study French literature and world religions at Leeds University.

The Lost Lights of St. Kilda was shortlisted for the 2021 Romantic Novelists Award. She now lives in Kingston upon Thames.

The Blurb

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.

In the Beginning...

Chapter 1

Fred - Tournai Prison, 1940

Five days in darkness deep as a pit and my mind begins to play tricks. I hear the silence as singing, a faint choir in a distant room. Gaelic? English? Not Jerry, that's for sure. Sometimes, it's the darkness itself, blooming into the images that swell and fade on the air, fuelled, no doubt, by the throbbing in my hand. Two nails gone, pulled out by the Gestapo. Worst of all is when the air becomes solid and I gasp, heart hammering, sweat on my palms. Then the only escape is to hold my  mind steady and stand on my island again, looking out at the Atlantic and the curve of the white sand around the bay. Slowly, very slowly, I turn in a half circle to see the crofts and the rise of the hills beyond like a comforting arm sheltering the village. A thin veil of cloud rises over the summit of Conachair, evaporating away as it starts to pour down the hillside, and high above, a sky that's pure blue and endless. I breathe in deeply, the air clean and sea-blessed. Concentrating now so that the scene before me does not flicker or fade, I take a step, and another. Blades of grass, oiled and bright with sun, pass beneath my feet, the turf sprinkled with white daisies and tormentil as I move towards the line of bothies along the curve of the shore. A dog barks a greeting. Mary Gillies sits in front of a cottage spinning, the squeak of the turning wood as she lets the threat in and out, singing something in Gaelic as she works...

Gosh, quite an intense beginning, helped along by the absence of a paragraph break. It definitely has left me wanting to read more.